Earth systems science is fundamentally cross-disciplinary, and increasingly this requires sharing and exchange of data across discipline boundaries. Significant difficulties arise through differences in exchange formats, lack of agreed semantics, divergent access mechanisms, etc.

However, recent developments in distributed, service-oriented, information systems are leading to rapid advances in data interoperability. Adoption of common architectural approaches supported by web-based (W3C, OASIS, ISO, OGC) standards provides an opportunity to greatly simplify the task of discovering, evaluating, and accessing Earth science data as needed.

In particular, standardised conceptual models and encodings are being developed in many areas for data representation and exchange. They often represent agreement within communities of practice around common vocabularies, information classes, data relationships, and metadata profiles.

This session aims to present and discuss relevant topics and open issues dealing with data and metadata models and encoding (markup) languages for the Earth and space sciences. These include, but are not limited to:

1) data and metadata schemas for the Earth and space sciences
2) mark-up languages
3) conceptual models for scientific data types
4) ISO coverages and features as different views of data
5) multi-dimensional data modeling
6) observations and measurement models and schemas
7) harmonization of data and metadata models between the geospatial, and Earth and space science communities
8) integrating binary formats with conceptual schemas and mark-up languages
9) multilingualism
10) data and metadata granularity
11) discovery, evaluation and use metadata
12) exposing data models through web-based services