ABSTRACT
The twenty-first century is marked by an unprecedented, constantly increasing volume of data in most of the scientific disciplines. In particular, there has been a phenomenal growth in the volume and variety of spatial and spatiotemporal data available for research and applications in geoscience and geoinformatics. A large number of spaceborne, airborne and in situ instruments have been accumulating Petabytes (PB 1015) of Earth Observation (EO), and mathematical models have been contributing comparable amounts as well. The typical data sets handled in analyses have grown in size from Gigabytes (GB 109) to Terabytes (TB 1012). Data holdings are in the PB 1015 range with expected growth to the Exabyte (EB 1018) level (Williams 2009).
