The ESPAS Near-Earth Space Data Infrastructure for e-Science is bringing together data from many distributed data repositories of interest to MIST science. This includes data from ground and space based instruments sensing the Earth’s atmosphere, ionosphere, magnetosphere and plasmasphere. The purpose is to encourage the exploitation of multi-instrument, multi-point science data for analysis and to support the development and improvement of models.

We will describe how ESPAS provides access to distributed data sets and how new data providers are supported to make their data sets available through ESPAS with the data registration tool.

Metadata is the key to this ESPAS interoperability and is underpinned by the ESPAS Data Model. Consistent metadata in ESPAS is supported by the ESPAS Ontology. This defines a series of vocabularies such as Feature of Interest and Instrument Type to allow data providers to re-use definitions and to make data retrieval consistent and straightforward for data users.

We will look at what you can do with the data from ESPAS by way of downloading and plotting files and data values. We will describe an example value-added service: the TEC time series plotter service developed by DLR. This is a downloadable, stand-alone service available from ESPAS that can take SWACI TEC maps (also available through ESPAS) and use them to generate time series plots for rapid analysis or monitoring of TEC.

ESPAS invites the MIST community to hear about what we have developed to date, and to ask for your feedback on ESPAS. https://www.espas-fp7.eu/portal/