The European Space Agency and other organisations in Europe and worldwide have engaged in the development of significant Earth Observation Data and Information Systems for data exploitation in support to scientific utilisation and future commercial applications. In Europe, these infrastructures involve facilities for acquisition, archiving and processing of satellite data and user services facilities, eg in Germany, UK, France, Sweden, Spain, Italy, and extending to Canada. They interoperate with other such system infrastructures associated with an increasing number of international satellite missions exchanging data globally, thereby creating one of the world's largest Digital Libraries. The internetworking of data centres and scientific institutions, upstream towards the satellite operator systems and downstream towards end-users, poses another significant challenge to networking and differs significantly between applications. Applications can be regional, eg flood monitoring in natural hazards management, multinational, eg oilslick detection in the Mediterranean, or global, eg climate change research.
Requirements evolve beyond data discovery to on-line retrieval and delivery of high volume data.
At present much of this internetworking still relies on the public Internet, with its current capabilities and level of saturation effectively stopping further evolution of networked applications. Future Outlook Technical advances in the management of network services may form the basis for a new European-level framework, guiding the provision of research network infrastructure in support to VRIs. For the first time it may be possible to provide more tailored services to identified research application domains, locations and user communities. Fragmentation into multiple network infrastructure initiatives should be avoided, and application level programmes should be more closely linked to a supporting network infrastructure framework, eg through the participation of advanced European user groups, leading projects and organisations representing critical European missions.