71Building Open Environments to Meet Big Data Challenges in Earth Sciences
using Earth sciences data among geosciences research and education communities,
such as difculties in nding, accessing, and using multisource data, lack of analytic
functions and computing resources, and very limited data-intensive computing/
modeling capability (Ledley et al., 2008; Lynnes, 2008; Deng and Di, 2009). Big
Earth Data problems have severely hampered the Earth sciences or geosciences
research, education, and applications. Data users need to put great efforts and time
(days, weeks, or even months) in obtaining and preprocessing data into ready-to-use
form for analysis. Very often, a scientic task becomes impossible due to the lack
of data, computing resourc ...