Data Federation for the Brazilian Weather and Climate Virtual Observatory: First Insights

The Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has a significant amount on a wide range of data about weather and climate, collected from sensors or calculated by numerical models. The current approach to disseminate information extracted from the sensors or models present limitations that could be solved by developing a Virtual Observatory (Brazilian Weather and Climate Virtual Observatory). Data federation is an approach to deal with large volumes of data coming from different sources in different formats. This paper presents an overview on Data Federation definition and concepts with a specific interest in finding out some insights on its application for climate and weather domains. The main idea is to show how Data Federation has been addressed in the literature and in what domains it has been utilized along with challenges and issues that have to be sorted out. In order to perform this study, papers from publication databases such as IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink and Science Direct have been studied.