Scientific portals and gateways are important components of many large-scale Earth Science projects. Through user-friendly web interfaces integrated into the same environment, researchers and scientists can securely and transparently access to computational and data sources, services, tools, sensors, etc. Scientific portals and gateways are able to provide a community-centric view, workflow/dataflow services and a strong support in accessing to the cyberinfrastructure including grid and cloud based resources. In the Earth Science context, scientific gateways play a key role since they allow scientists to transparently access to distributed data repositories (across several domains and institutions), metadata sources, carry out search & discovery activities, as well as visualization and analysis ones, etc.
Finally, Scientific Gateways can play an important role for training students (at the academic level) in the ES disciplines, attract new users and representing a relevant centralized knowledge repository in the ES context.

This session will be related, among the others, to the following topics:
- Earth Science Gateways to cloud/grid computing services;
- State of the art, summary, surverys concerning Earth Science Gateways
- Workflow/dataflow support in the Scientific Portals
- Education Gateways in the Earth Science context
- Applications of virtual world technologies to Earth Science and education gateways;
- Grid portals and gateways deployments, including User Portals, Application Portals, Science Gateways, Education Portals, User interface/usability studies;
- Design and architecture of Grid portals, portal containers, and gateways for Earth Science;
- Framework for Grid Portals development;
- Secury Models in the Earth Science Gateways