GENESI-DR, (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories), has the challenge of establishing open Earth Science Digital Repository access for European and world-wide science users.

GENESI-DR shall operate, validate and optimise the integrated access and use available digital data repositories to demonstrate how Europe can best respond to the emerging global needs relating to the state of the Earth, a demand that is unsatisfied so far.

GENESI-DR has identified the following objectives:

• To provide guaranteed, reliable, easy, effective, and operational access to a variety of data sources, and demonstrate how the same approach can be extended to provide access to all Earth Science data

• To harmonise operations at key Earth Science data repositories limiting fragmentation of solution

• To demonstrate effective curation and prepare the frame for approaching long term preservation of Earth Science data

• To validate the effective capabilities required to access distributed repositories for new communities, including education, and assess benefits and impacts

• To integrate new scientific and technological derived paradigms in operational infrastructures in responds to the latest Earth Science requirements

GENESI-DR builds upon the existing, operational and focused Earth Observation (EO) European infrastructure and involves key Earth Science centres responsible for operational data acquisition, processing, archiving and distribution.

The European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) initiated, jointly supported by all ESA and EU member countries, a parallel international initiative called Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES), which is now considered to be the European contribution to GEOSS.