
Earth-Science data are composite, multidimensional and of significant size, and as such, continue to pose a number of on-going problems regarding their management. With new and diverse information sources emerging as well as rates of generated data continuously increasing, a persistent challenge becomes more pressing: to make the information existing in multiple heterogeneous resources readily available. The widespread use of the XML data-exchange format has enabled the rapid accumulation of semi-structured metadata for Earth-Science data.