The increased demand of Earth Observation data from the user community brings a challenge for Earth Observation satellite operators, Space Agencies and EO data providers to manage the data and to offer the access to the different products as coherently and easily as possible. The approved Programme like GMES needed operational EO data stream from multiple missions to serve different Environmental Services, or the Climate Change Initiative using time data series are few examples of such demand. With the need to allocate available financial resources as carefully as possible but also to handle an increasing number of different missions, a closer cooperation in the ground segment development, the operations and the data exploitation becomes a necessity.

A 'Ground Segment Coordination Body' (GSCB) of all agencies in member states investing in and managing Earth Observation Payload Data Ground Segments for their national missions was established in June 2005 and shares the respective expertise in the development and operations of Payload Ground Segments of the major European and Canadian missions to address this challenge.

The GSCB coordinates and shares its findings with other coordination and standardisation entities like GEO, CEOS, OGC and INSPIRE. This workshop was devoted to present and consult with all the European and Canadian earth observation mission operators the results achieved, as well as, to steer the GSCB plan of activities according to the areas of interest of this community.

The major projects, accompanied by the GCSB are Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA), Long–Term Data Preservation (LTDP) and the Quality for Earth Observation framework (QA4EO).

HMA guaranteed interoperability of mission data catalogue, ordering and data distribution systems in order to allow a seamless and transparent access of all relevant earth observation data, it was implemented for GMES. LTDP defines a framework to guarantee EO data preservation and accessibility. Last but not least the QA4EO initiative, under the auspices of CEOS/GEO, is a quality assurance framework for EO data that is related to the basic user need to have access to quality information (e.g. accuracy and precision) of the utilised EO data and products, and to the need to maintain the traceability of all processing steps carried out in the generation of EO products.

In order to present the status of the GSCB’s work, the GSCB conducted a one and half day workshop at ESA ESRIN in Frascati, Italy.

The workshop gave an overview on the status and the achievements of the GSCB, with an insight view on HMA, LTDP, QA4EO and the Earth Observation network infrastructure.

It gave room for the mission operators to present their plans and achievements with regard to interoperability implementation, quality control concept, and networking infrastructure as well as, to provide an active feedback on the GSCB workplan.