ESGF Federation Design

The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) is a spontaneous collaboration of groups, agencies and institutions around the world, that are dedicated to the development and operation of a long-term system for the management, access and analysis of climate data. Some of the challenges that ESGF is committed to address include:

The ESGF architecture is based on a system of autonomous and distributed Nodes, which interoperate through common acceptance of federation protocols and trust agreements. Data is stored at multiple Nodes, and served through local data and metadata services. Nodes exchange information about their data holdings and services, trust each other for registering users and establishing access control decisions. The net result is that a user can use a web browser or rich desktop client, connect to any Node, and seamlessly find and access data throughout the federation (see ESGF Architecture for more details).

At each Node, the ESGF software stack is the result of the integration of multiple applications and servers, either developed by some of the ESGF partners, or freely available from the community. The ESGF software development methodology is based on the principle of modularity, open source and open development (see the ESGF Manifesto for more details).

The ESGF Federation Protocols

Interoperability among all Nodes in the ESGF federation is based on a peer-to-peer paradigm for exchanging information about services, trusts, and metadata holdings. Specifically, the following protocols and mechanism make all the Nodes in the federation work together as a whole:

ESGF Clients

Traditionally, the data and metadata services deployed throughout the ESGF system have been made available to users through a standard web browser. Increasingly though the ESGF collaboration is working towards enabling direct access to these services via rich desktop clients and toolkits, which allow scripted and more powerful access. Specifically, the following clients are being developed.