The Satellite Image Data Service (SIDS) is provided by Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIIMAS) (http://landmap.mimas.ac.uk) for UK academics. SIDS is one of two National Data Centres funded and supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) (www.jisc.ac.uk) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) of the UK. SIDS began with a collective investment by the UK academic community in UK coverage of Landsat 5 and SPOT data. Later JISC invested in the Landmap project, initiated and managed by SIDS in collaboration with University College London (UCL). Landmap created a DEM for the British Isles using SAR interfero–metery, without the need for ground-control points. The DEM and associated orthorectified ESR data were then used to orthorectify Landsat and Spot data for the British Isles. The orthorectified satellite data was made available to academic users for web download. Visualisation of the data was provided through ‘quick looks’, in the usual way of remote-sensing data providers.

Census Data
More recently, the OGC standards have offered us for the first time a revolutionary way to make our data available to our users in a standard, interoperable way that is also easily scalable. We applied the experience of the Integrated CEOS European Data Server
http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/ at UCL to build a new way to deliver a comprehensive visualisation and data delivery system that uses OGC OpenGIS Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) Specifications. The added benefit of this system is the full interoperability it offers. MIMAS is looking into extending the use of OGC standards to the delivery of Census (http://census.ac.uk/cdu) data in an interoperable way.

GRID
The SIDS data portfolio of satellite datasets is growing, and this is setting the agenda for our web delivery system. To this end we are looking into the use of the OpenGIS Web Catalogue Service (CSW) Specification for data search and access. Applications that process multiple satellite imagery to chart changes in the environment demand significant processing power. This has led us to investigate GRID processing solutions. So while the web is an environment for sharing information, the GRID is an environment for sharing computer power and data. SIDS has started a project to GRID-enable some applications using the OpenGIS Web Processing Service (WPS) Specification as well as CSW and WCS. The idea is for a user to interact with a client, consulting a catalogue service (CSW), deciding on data requirements, then deciding what processes are required to be done on the data (WPS), at which stage a WCS request will deliver the data to the compute node. Major research applications using GRID will become more common as more GRID-enabled Image Processing software products implement interfaces using the WPS standard. We would like to see the OGC standards extended to support satellite image streaming, and to see more applications solutions available for GRID environments.