One of NASA's missions is to "understand and protect our home planet." This is done primarily through remote sensing instruments in orbit around the earth. Visualization is an important tool to communicate remote sensing data to the public. The Scientific Visualization Studio, part of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, produces many scientific visualizations that are freely available to the public on its web site. However, conventional web sites can be inconvenient for users and especially difficult for automated processes to navigate and find available visualizations. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has developed standardized protocols to allow content viewers to directly access the content made available from content providers. Over the last two years, the Scientific Visualization Studio has developed a new server that provides over 100 interesting and useful scientific visualizations through the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) protocol. WMS has proven to be a convenient and useful means to distribute NASA's scientific research.
Citation:
Eric Sokolowsky, Horace Mitchell, Jeff de La Beaujardiere , "NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio Image Server," ieee_vis, pp.103, 16th IEEE Visualization 2005 (VIS 2005), 2005