ABOUT EADS ASTRIUM Satellite & METIS LIGHT

EADS ASTRIUM - ALL THE SPACE YOU NEED.

Astrium is a global space industry leader, with world-class expertise and extensive prime contractorship experience across all sectors of the space business. Astrium is a 100% subsidiary of EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space) Company like Airbus, Military Transport Aircraft, Eurocopter and Defence & Secuity Systems subsidiaries.

Astrium's activities are based in three key areas:

• Astrium Space Transportation: The European prime contractor for civil and military space transportation and manned space activities,
• Astrium Satellites: A world leader in the design and manufacture of satellite systems,
• Astrium Services: At the forefront of satellite services in the secure communications and navigation fields.

Astrium Satellite is a world leader in the design and manufacture of satellite systems, payloads, ground infrastructure and equipment. Astrium Satellite provides cutting-edge customer solutions in all sectors:

• Earth Observation,
• Telecommunication,
• Military systems,
• Space science,
• Navigation,
• Subsystems equipment and operations.

EADS Astrium was involved in the Open Geospatial Consortium as a Technical Member at the start up of the project and now as a Principal Member.

EADS Astrium is one of the European Leader for all the Earth Observation aspect and was the Systems Architect of the FedEO (Federated Earth Observation Resources) Pilot Project in 2007.

METIS LIGHT - AGGREGATE THE WORLD.

Metis is an EADS Astrium Satellite internal R&D project launched in 2006 with the emergence of all the GIS (Geographic Information System). It has been initiated due to three factors:

• The increasing of available geo-referenced data over the web, especially standardized and interoperable thematics products,
• The emergence of mapping apis like Google Map, Yahoo Map or Virtual Earth
• The identification of users' needs through multinational federating project like GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security)

MeTiS is a Meta EarTh Information Server dedicated to environmental monitoring purpose. It provides access to remote interoperable servers such as background " streaming " web map APIs (Googlemap, YahooMap, Windows Live Local, etc.) and environmental standardised Web Map Service offering access to data/products at different scales relevant to different user communities.

MeTiS offers many functional and operational capabilities like:

• Navigate into a web map application dedicated to environmental monitoring.
• Subscribe to a certain number of Web Map Service (WMS) and dynamically aggregate the related layers.
• Define and manage different thematic working environments.
• Save/restore the user context for further connexions.
• Subscribe to geo-referenced events periodically updated

MeTiS is based on the OpenLayers JavaScript Library.

MeTiS : Web 2.0 technologies crossroad

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform.

MeTiS takes all the advantages of all this new emerging technologies.
It is based on:

• OGC Web Map Services protocols for displaying all the geo-referenced data,
• AJAX (Asynchronous Request) for all the other part of interactive web applications,
• Javascripts frameworks like prototype and script.aculo.us coupled to elaborated CSS Stylesheets for the user interfaces.

MeTiS offers to users the capability to connect from anywhere keeping the same multi-thematic working environments.

Interoperability benefits

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services.

EADS ASTRIUM is principal member of the OGC. Based on the geospatial data and products main specifications, MeTiS give the opportunities to the final users to aggregate layers available through Web Map Service (WMS).

A WMS produces maps of spatially referenced data dynamically from geographic information. This International Standard defines a " map " to be a portrayal of geographic information as a digital image file suitable for display in a SIG. WMS-produced maps are generally rendered in a pictorial format such as PNG, GIF or JPEG, or occasionally as vector-based graphical elements in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) or Web Computer Graphics Metafile (WebCGM) formats.