The Open Data Interface (ODI) is a database system for storing space environment data and metadata in an SQL database. The system is compliant with the SPASE data model. Data can be ingested from text files and CDF/ISTP/PRBEM files. Currently there are more than 100 datasets in the database such as IMP8/GME, SREM, XMM/ERMD, GOES particle and radiation data, and indices such as Dst, Kp, and SSN. Adding new datasets is straightforward. Model and code have been developed to convert CDF metadata into SPASE metadata. The process proceeds in two steps where the metadata can be further edited before stored in the database. If the raw data to be ingested are CDF files these are automatically converted before the data are stored into ODI. For non-CDF files, like plain text files, a few lines of code need to be edited to correctly parse the raw data files. As ODI is based on SQL it is accessible to a large range of different software platforms. As part of the development, interfaces to IDL, PHP, Python, Matlab and Java have been developed, but the ODBC interface also can provide direct access from many other programs. Interfaces to existing platforms can therefore be set up and applications have been updated to connect to the ODI system like SAAPS, SEDAT, and SPENVIS.

The Space Weather (SWE) Data Centre being developed in the frame of ESA's SSA pro-gramme is intended to provide a central Service Oriented Architecture framework capable of integrating new space weather services and tools. In the frame of the project DC-IV, "Evolution of the Pilot Data Centres", two new precursor services are being developed and integrated:

Three complementary projects have been funded under the EC's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) during the last years, namely HELIO, IMPEx and ESPAS. This presentation demonstrates how to proceed on a use case of studying an event produced on the Sun and gather all the information available on its travel through the heliosphere - helped by HELIO-, the observations in the magnetosphere - with the tools provided by IMPEx - and finally its effects on Earth (eg, ionosphere) - capability offered by ESPAS. The projects aim to help the interaction between communities which have evolved independently over decades by creating a set of tools to find relevant datasets easily (and provide relevant metadata). The use of standards and workflow tools (eg., Taverna) simplifies this exercise by offering to the scientist a comprehensive view of the event under study.
In addition, it will be shown here the progress made by the ER-flow project for the heliophysics community. ER-flow is a FP7 project that builds community focused portals that run complex workflows.

The Sun and heliosphere is a complex, connected system, observed by many different instruments. The data collected by these instruments is heterogenous, and can consist of images, time series, emission spectra, etc. Further, there are a number of feature and event catalogs, both manually and automatically populated, that describe discrete occurrences of physical phenomena, such as solar flares. These data have multiple uses, and multiple audiences who want to interrogate these data for different purposes.

This talk will describe our efforts in designing and implementing the Helioviewer Project, an ESA/NASA funded project to give users everywhere the capability to explore the Sun and inner heliosphere and to give transparent access to the underlying data. We describe our experience in creating browsing, visualization and discovery tools that present different data types from different data sources. We discuss the challenges that have arisen in integrating important services such as the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase and the Virtual Solar Observatory into Helioviewer Project tools. Finally, we advocate the notion that interoperability is the key to creating a service ecosystem that not only promotes all existing tools for solar and space weather science and services, but can also nurture new ones.

The Space Environment Information System to support Operations (SEISOP) is a data and knowledge system being developed by DEIMOS for the European Space Operations Center (ESOC) of the European Space Agency (ESA).

The objective of the SEISOP project is to provide to the mission operators, project teams, spacecraft development engineers and scientists a set of services capable to supply, extracted knowledge related to the Space Environment and its effects in the spacecraft as well as plug-in interfaces for new models.

This paper will present the innovate Service Oriented Architecture and technologies used to implement SEISOP and its deployment in the context of the European Situation Awareness Program (SSA) lead by ESA and will focus on the gathering and processing of data from different sources in order to make it available to users of the system in an standardized way.

Swiff is a project funded by the European Commission FP7 program. Swiff is chartered with the task of space weather forecasts on fundamental physics models. We will present three examples developed by Swiff partners:

First, SEP are generated by macroscopic events such as flares and CMES that are typically modeled by fluid models that do not retain a full kinetic description of the particle life. Statistical or empirical models are then deployed to represent the generation of SEP from a certain event. The Swiff approach is to interlock directly kinetic and fluid simulations so that the particles and the fields are advanced self consistently. This is crucial because particle acceleration in shocks and reconnection regions are very sensitive to wave particle interactions that require a self-consistent treatment of fields and particles. The approach is used in Ref. 1.

Second, global models of the Earth environment typically rely on fluid MHD and in the most advanced cases on hybrid (fluid electrons and kinetic ions). Swiff has developed a pioneering approach for a full kinetic approach: the implicit moment method [2,3] implemented in the code iPic3D [4]. We will report 2D and 3D models of the global magnetosphere based on a full kinetic model where both electrons and ions are kinetic and driven by solar wind drive as can be obtained either from models of the heliosphere (e.g. ENLIL) or direct data (e.g. ACE).

Third, general space weather models require to couple many methods and codes. Swiff started a collaboration in particular with the Space Weather Modelling Framework (SWMF) based in Michigan and is working to import the iPic3D in the SWMF framework. A first demonstration of coupling the code BATS'R'US with iPic3D was demonstrated at the annual meeting at EGU in Vienna [5]. The approach demonstrated the ability to resolve fully kinetically regions of reconnections fully coupled within a larger fluid model.

[1] Baumann, Gisela, and Ake Nordlund. "Particle-in-cell Simulation of Electron Acceleration in Solar Coronal Jets." The Astrophysical Journal Letters 759.1 (2012): L9.
[2] Brackbill, J. U., and D. W. Forslund. "An implicit method for electromagnetic plasma simulation in two dimensions." Journal of Computational Physics 46.2 (1982): 271-308.
[3] Lapenta, Giovanni. "Particle simulations of space weather." Journal of Computational Physics 231.3 (2012): 795-821.
[4] Markidis, Stefano, and Giovanni Lapenta. "Multi-scale simulations of plasma with iPIC3D." Mathematics and Computers in Simulation 80.7 (2010): 1509-1519. [5] Toth, Gabor, et al. "Coupling the BATS-R-US global MHD code with the implicit particle-in-cell code iPIC3D." EGU General Assembly Conference Abstracts. Vol. 15. 2013.

The aim of ESPAS platform is to integrate heterogeneous data from the earth's thermosphere, ionosphere, plasmasphere and magnetosphere. ESPAS supports the systematic exploration of multipoint measurements from the near-Earth space through homogenised access to multi-instrument data. It provides access to more than 40 datasets: Cluster, EISCAT, GIRO, DIAS, SWACI, CHAMP, SuperDARN, FPI, magnetometers INGV, SGO, DTU, IMAGE, TGO, IMAGE/RPI, ACE, SOHO, PROBA2, NOAA/POES, etc. The concept of extensibility to new data sets is an important element in the ESPAS architecture.
Within the first year of the project, the main components of the system have been developed, namely, the data model, the XML schemas for metadata exchange format, the ontology, the wrapper installed at the data nodes so that the main platform harvest the metadata, the main platform built on the D-NET framework and the GUI with its designed workflows. The first working prototype supports the search for datasets among a selected number of databases (i.e., EDAM, DIAS, Cluster, SWACI data). The next immediate step would be the implementation of search for characteristics within the datasets. For the second release we are planning to deploy tools for conjunctions between ground-space and space-space and for coincidences. For the final phase of the project the ESPAS infrastructure will be extensively tested through the application of several use cases, designed to serve the needs of the wide interdisciplinary users and producers communities, such as the ionospheric, thermospheric, magnetospheric, space weather and space climate communities, the geophysics community, the space communications engineering, HF users, satellite operators, navigation and surveillance systems, and space agencies. The final ESPAS platform is expected to be delivered in 2015.

The abstract is submitted on behalf of the ESPAS-FP7EU team (http://www.espas-fp7.eu): Mike Hapgood, Anna Belehaki, Spiros Ventouras, Natalia Manola, Antonis Lebesis, Bruno Zolesi, Tatjana Gerzen, Ingemar H&aumlggstrom, Anna Charisi, Ivan Galkin, Jurgen Watermann, Jesse Andries, Matthew Angling, Timo Asikainen, Alan Aylward, Henrike Barkmann, Peter Bergqvist, Andrew Bushell, Fabien Darrouzet, Dimitris Dialetis, Carl-Fredrik Enell, Daniel Heynderickx, Norbert Jakowski, Magnar Johnsen, Jean Lilensten, Ian McCrea, Kalevi Mursula, Bogdan Nicula, Michael Pezzopane, Viviane Pierrard, Bodo Reinisch, Bernd Ritschel, Luca Spogli, Iwona Stanislawska, Claudia Stolle, Eija Tanskanen, Ioanna Tsagouri, Esa Turunen, Thomas Ulich, Matthew Wild, Tim Yeoman

The ESA ITT project (AO/1-6738/11/NL/AT) - to develop Phase 1 of a Virtual Space Weather Modelling Centre - has the following objectives and scope:

1. The construction of a long term (~10 yrs) plan for the future development of a European virtual space weather modelling centre consisting of a new 'open' and distributed framework for the coupling of physics based models for space weather phenomena;
   
2. The assessment of model capabilities and the amount of work required to make them operational by integrating them in this framework and the identification of computing and networking requirements to do so.
   
3. The design of a system to enable models and other components to be installed locally or geographically distributed and the creation of a validation plan including a system of metrics for testing results.
   

ESA invests in model execution environments such as Vispanet, SPENVIS, and the VSWMC. In the U.S., NASA operates CCMC, but there are also collaborations based on the Space Weather Modelling Framework and on the Center for Integrated Space Weather Modelling Framework. But why would a modeller actually take the trouble to comply with such a common modelling framework? Indeed, this requires a considerable investment of time. In general, the model computations may also incur a computational overhead. We will therefore review a number of good reasons and benefits that could convince model developers to comply with a shared modelling framework, but this puts some requirements on the framework.

A first objective is to minimise the effort for the modeller. The framework should operate based on a clear definition of the data structures to be read or written, or to be exchanged with other models, so that it is actually self-documenting. A minimum coding effort should be needed to comply with the framework. A development environment must be provided that includes testing and debugging facilities for contributed models, e.g. for monitoring the data flows.

A second objective is to maximise the return to the modeller. A modelling framework can provide model performance metrics, so that the modeller himself no longer has to invest in implementing such an infrastructure. Using a common framework, a modeller can easily collaborate with others in a modular approach to multi-physics modelling. The framework can provide a flexible way of swapping models in a coupled model set, which would allow to evaluate model performance from the scientific point of view through comparative studies. This allows a modeller to easily compare and evaluate various versions and improvements to his model. Being able to incorporate one’s model into a more complete description of the problem at hand will heighten the modellers awareness of the qualities and limitations of his model, which is likely to benefit space weather modelling in general and to bring the scientist closer to the end user application. In addition, the modeller will get useful feedback on possible improvements.

Current efforts in the community, such as ESA's Virtual Space Weather Modelling Centre, envisage to provide this kind of support, at least in the long run.

We will organise a debate on the future of the infrastructures supporting space weather science and services. The debate will consist of a 10 minutes presentation by the session conveners, followed by targeted questions to session speakers and to the public. This debate will last 30 minutes.

The UK Met Office provides a space weather forecasting service which operates 24/7. Through working with a range of partners, including the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the British Geological Survey (BGS), the UK Space Agnecy & the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Met Office have developed this service to monitor solar activity. Described here is the Enlil model which has been implemented operationally at the Met Office & provides a back-up for the NOAA SWPC model. Also described are a number of models which will be implemented to provide futher information for the Met Office Hazard Centre forecasters. These models include the Multi-Instrument Data Analysis System (MIDAS) which performs 3D tomography of the ionosphere, & SPACECAST which forecasts the high energy electron flux in the radiation belts.

The Solar Timelines Viewer for AFFECTS (STAFF) is a dynamical online viewer that provides a whole range of timelines related to solar activity and space weather. It is currently being developed at the Royal Observatory of Belgium (ROB) as part of the FP7 project AFFECTS (Advanced Forecast For Ensuring Communications Through Space).

The STAFF viewer and its database have been designed to allow the user to view and compare timelines from different data sources in any time interval, ranging from real time to the full archive of past data. STAFF is a web-based application based on JSP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript and is built on top of a PostgreSQL database.

Since it is tailored to space weather operations, STAFF provides easy and dynamical access to realtime space weather timelines such as GOES X-ray curves, ACE data and geomagnetic indices. It also serves solar activity timelines such as the International Sunspot Number and the F10.7 radio flux. Furthermore, STAFF will provide in the near future some brand new proxies extracted automatically from coronal EUV images (AIA, SWAP, EIT), like the total flux observed in the telescope passband, active region area, and total EUV intensity within active regions. Finally, STAFF can show views of previous Carrington rotations and has a feature that allows grafting customized plots into other webpages.

The STAFF database infrastructure is designed for quick access of timelines and allows for long term research on all datasets.

We present the STAFF viewer and database, its principles and design, as well as its power and ease-of-use for the user.

Astronomically images in general, and solar images in particular, are traditionally stored and distributed as FITS files. In its simplest version, a FITS file consists of a human-readable ASCII header of keyword-value pairs containing the metadata, followed by a binary part containing the actual data. In addition, a FITS file may contain several extensions, and each of these may contain a data object.

Over the years, the FITS format has become very popular. Nevertheless in a world where interoperability is the norm, the FITS format has to face a few problems. One of them is that the keywords are limited to 8 characters and their meaning not always unique nor clear. Several attempts have been made to standardise the keywords, ranging from full FITS standard keywords, IAU approved keywords to more discipline specific keyword dictionaries. In addition, specific papers exist for describing world & celestial, spectral and time coordinates in FITS (http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_wcs.html).

The keyword description documents we are aware of are not machine readable. This is a strong limitation on interoperability as it means that essentially manual work has to be done when combining solar images from different sources (e.g. in versatile image viewers) or when porting the images to virtual observatory efforts with their own data model.

In this paper we explore solutions to this problem by encapsulating the FITS file in a VOTable (XML format) with the metadata referring to IVOAA standards. We then propose a procedure to translate form this exploded view to any destination data model. As a real-life example we show the conversion of SWAP and LYRA FITS files to the ESPAS data model.

Solar radio spectrometers are a key element for the monitoring of the solar activity, providing information on flare-accelerated particles and shock waves propagating in the corona or the interplanetary medium. For historical reasons, each observatory operating such instruments (ground-based or space-based) has developed his own data format, sometimes proprietary, sometimes derived from international data format (FITS, CDF...), but even in that case without much coordination, hampering therefore the possibility to easily combine these data together. We review here the current situation, discuss which information is needed for a better integration and propose some solutions.

The Real-time database for high-resolution neutron monitor measurements (NMDB) provides access to ground-based cosmic ray measurements from Neutron Monitors. As the project was funded only for two years, we have created a database that can be operated in the long term without incurring license fees. For this only an open source database comes into consideration. We chose MySQL as our database,
since at the time of the creation of NMDB, MySQL provided the easiest solution to replicate the data to different servers, by which we can improve the accessibility of the data due to full NMDB mirrors at different institutes. Since 2007, there have been many changes in MySQL land: MySQL has been sold twice and there are some concerns that the development of MySQL may be stopped by its current owner.
Fortunately there are several open source forks of MySQL, which guarantee the future of our database. In addition to this, current versions of MySQL (and MariaDB) include improvements which allow for a real multi-master setup.
With this setup a NMDB 2.0 database with several distributed masters could be created, so that NMDB can continue to grow without overloading our database and providing even faster access for data providers and users.

The EU/FP7 project SEPServer has produced a new tool, which greatly facilitates the investigation of solar energetic particles (SEPs) and their origin: a server providing SEP data, related electromagnetic (EM) observations and analysis methods, comprehensive catalogues of the observed SEP events, and educational/outreach material on solar eruptions. The project has combined data and knowledge from eleven European partners and several collaborating parties from Europe and the US. The datasets provided by the consortium partners have been collected in a MySQL database on a server, which also hosts a web interface providing browsing, plotting and post-processing and analysis tools developed by the consortium, as well as the SEP event catalogues. SEPServer adds value to several space missions and Earth-based observations by facilitating the coordinated exploitation of and open access to SEP data and related EM observations, and promoting correct use of these data for the entire space research community.

The server will be released to the public during the Tenth European Space Weather Week.

Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO) is located in Finland 120 km north of the Arctic Circle. SGO, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, has some of the longest time series of geospace observations in existence; geomegnetic observations since 1914 and ionosoundings since 1957. For the first 48 years, SGO ionograms were stored on 35 mm film and scaled manually. Since 2005 a new digital chirp ionosonde is used but ionospheric parameters are still read manually.

As part of the ESPAS project, SGO is committed to improve the online availability of these unique datasets. ESPAS data services at SGO will to a large extent be based on the MADRIGAL database, which is the de facto standard for incoherent scatter radar data. The SGO MADRIGAL service is deployed in collaboration between SGO and the radar groups at Millstone Hill and EISCAT. In this way ESPAS benefits from developments in the incoherent scatter radar community.

Since August 2012, the KAIRA, the Kilpisj&aumlrvi Atmospheric Imaging Receiver Array, which is a facility for Space Weather and Astronomy Research, has been in operation. KAIRA is located at Kilpisj&aumlrvi, Northern Finland, about 85 km east of Tromso, Norway. Originally, KAIRA was built for prototyping work related to develop receiver technology for the EISCAT_3D Incoherent Scatter Radar, which is a large, phased-array 3D-imaging radar system for Northern Europe.

KAIRA, however, is a highly versatile and interesting facility in its own right. It is a broad-band receiver operating between 10 MHz and 88 MHz (LBA) and 110 MHz and 270 MHz (HBA). It can be used, e.g., to monitor interplanetary as well as ionospheric scintillations, as an imaging riometer, as a receiver for passive radar applications using the signals of other transmitters in the area, or indeed as a receiver for the current EISCAT VHF incoherent scatter radar.

Here we highlight a selection of the first results and tell about the facilities capabilities for space weather research.

The immense volume of data generated by the suite of instruments on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) requires new tools for efficient identifying and accessing of data.
Cataloguing events and features is necessary in order to facilitate access to dataset of interest for the users. The Heliophysical Events Knowledge base (HEK) infrastructure was developed by LMSAL in order to fill in this need. The HEK gathers a set of feature-detection algorithms (some of which coming from the NASA-funded Feature Finding Team effort) in a common 'Event Detection System' which share a.o. a common vocabulary for the metadata. Web services and clients are provided for searching the metadata, reviewing the results, and efficiently accessing the data. For example, the HEK database can be queried from within IDL or Python, and selected datasets can be retrieved via the 'Virtual Solar Observatory' (VSO) infrastructure, for which an interface exists both in IDL and Python.

Recently, these clients were also used to display HEK events within visualization software such as the Helioviewer system. This link between HEK database and visualization software can be further utilized in order to display 'Space Weather alerts', as it is foreseen in the Space Weather Helioviewer software currently under development at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.

Geomagnetically induced currents in neutrals of the five transformer substations are used to investigate the effects of space weather on power grid in the framework of EURISGIC Project. Two years of continuous registration was given ample material to assess the dependence of GIC on the level of geomagnetic activity. Recorded GIC are compared with the results of model calculations. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement no260330.

At a COST 296 MIERS (Mitigation of Ionospheric Effects on Radio Systems) workshop held at the University of Nottingham in 2008, the establishment of a sophisticated Ionospheric Perturbation Detection and Monitoring (IPDM) network (http://ipdm.nottingham.ac.uk) was proposed by major European experts and encouraged by the Euroean Space Agency (ESA)as the way forward to deliver the state-of-the-art to protect the range of essential systems vulnerable to ionospheric threats. It was proposed the establishment of an operational European wide information service, capable of detecting and monitoring the whole spectrum of ionospheric perturbations and related scintillations (via geo-plasma warnings, now-casts and forecasts) for the wider European user community, including SME's, government offices, commercial and public users. Concurrent related research will help to develop effective techniques for mitigating ionospheric threats.

TRANSMIT (Training Research and Applications Network to Support the Mitigation of Ionospheric Threats),an FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network, is the precursor for the establishment of the IPDM network and focuses on GNSS and business sectors reliant to it. The project (www.transmit-ionosphere.net) exploits the existing specialized European science base and take advantage of insight and full commitment from European GNSS industry and end-users in order to prove the IPDM network concept and setup its prototype. TRANSMIT prototype is based on a consortium that brings together some of the biggest GNSS Rx manufactures and precise positioning service providers, as well as leading research institutes and universities around the Europe, to provide the requirements, final validation and lead the system development, respectively. The dissemination of the developed capabilities will be achieved via the web-based prototype system, which will operate on a number of pre-selected scenarios regarding the state of the ionosphere, and not in real-time.
In the recent TRANSMIT Newsletter (http://www.transmit-
ionosphere.net/transmit/newsletters.aspx)important constraints that are expected to influence the development of the TRANSMIT prototype system were presented. These constraints are: 1) the need for various levels of asset management (data/information/knowledge), 2) the rapid change of the development environment, which is worse further by the immaturity of the research layer to quickly comprehend and respond to the business needs, 3) the "integration" in terms of data, policies and processes and 4) the "data budget" which resembles similar data management requirements as the ones in the so-called Big-data or e-science environments.

This paper covers some of the main on going activities related to the development of the "Data System" (DS) that implements the various Data services required by the TRANSMIT prototype system. The preliminary infrastructure (hardware/software) to respond to the above mentioned constraints will be described and the results from the interfacing between the data and the application layers will be shown.

Helioviewer aims to become the sidekick of virtual observatories and aggregators of solar observations by providing quicklook data, context data and model visualisation. The Space Weather Helioviewer (SWHV, ESTEC/ITT AO/1-7186) is an extension of the JHelioviewer application (http://jhelioviewer.org) with space weather relevant capabilities within a streamlined user interface. The Helioviewer project can be seen from two sides: On one hand, it involves the visualisation of the various datasets and their combination in new ways. On the other hand, it develops and implements standards and APIs in order to be able to quickly handle this data in new contexts without much overhead. The data itself is heterogeneous: it contains 1D data (timelines); 2D data (solar images and spectrograms); 3D data (multi-spacecraft imaging, magnetic field lines modeling), solar event detections (e.g. HEK) and space weather alerts. Therefore one of the main goals of the project is to present this quicklook data through a uniform and convenient API.

Understanding space weather phenomena requires access to many different types of information and tools. Advances in technology have resulted in a wealth of capabilities being easily accessible through the Internet; some of these can easily be used together but this is not the general case. We propose to try to work towards a more general research environment that incorporates as many of the existing tools as possible.

In the HELIO project we have developed a comprehensive set of services that can be used to address science use cases in heliophysics including space weather effects on the Earth. The interfaces of the HELIO services are compliant with standards developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) although some extensions have been necessary because of differences in the types of query that need to be made.

In the CASSIS project we have been examining ways of improving interoperability between services and data and metadata sets. The HELIO project is a good template to work from but clearly other ideas will need to be factored in if we try to incorporate

We report on the experience we have gained in developing capabilities that are compliant with standards and the adjustments that have been necessary. We also describe the steps need to create a collaborative research environment for space weather.

We have developed an automated software system of identifying solar active regions, filament channels, and coronal holes, those are three major solar sources causing the space weather. Space weather forecasters of NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center produce the solar synoptic drawings as a daily basis to predict solar activities, i.e., solar flares, filament eruptions, high speed solar wind streams, and co-rotating interaction regions as well as their possible effects to the Earth. As an attempt to emulate this process with a fully automated and consistent way, we developed a software system named ASSA(Automated Solar Synoptic Analysis). When identifying solar active regions, ASSA uses high-resolution SDO HMI intensitygram and magnetogram as inputs and providing McIntosh classification and Mt. Wilson magnetic classification of each active region by applying appropriate image processing techniques such as thresholding, morphology extraction, and region growing. At the same time, it also extracts morphological and physical properties of active regions in a quantitative way for the short-term prediction of flares and CMEs. When identifying filament channels and coronal holes, images of global H-alpha network and SDO AIA 193 are used for morphological identification and also SDO HMI magnetograms for quantitative verification. The output results of ASSA are routinely checked and validated against NOAA';s daily SRS(Solar Region Summary) and UCOHO(URSIgram code for coronal hole information). A couple of preliminary scientific results are to be presented using available output results. ASSA will be deployed at the Korean Space Weather Center and serve its customers in an operational status by the end of 2012.

The primary objective of ESPAS is to support the access to observations from the near-Earth space environment. This is a region that extends from the Eart's atmosphere up to the inner magnetosphere. Observing instruments that are linked to ESPAS include ionosondes, incoherent scatter radars, magnetometers, GNSS receivers and a large number of space sensors and radars. The ESPAS platform supports the systematic exploration of multi-point measurements from near-Earth space through homogeneous access to diverse data, enhances researchers' capability to develop advanced models of the geospace, supports data assimilation and provides tools for validation of models. Although the system development is in its early phase, the consortium has already started to analyse indicative scientific problems, whose study will be possible through the use of ESPAS services. The scientific advances resulting from these studies will lead to the development of validated scientific models and consequently to reliable predictions and related products and value-added services that will meet the needs of scientists, operators, decision makers, system developers, etc. An important work done within the ESPAS project is the definition of several scientific scenarios called "use cases". The "use cases" express the user requirements on the ESPAS system, in other words they express "what" the system should be able to perform. These scenarios are exploring the required behaviour of ESPAS and form a solid basis for testing the system's behaviour as it responds to a request that originates from outside of the system. The following main groups of use cases are under analysis and first results will be reported in the ESWW10: a) Homogenised access to the main ESPAS data repositories b) coincidences and conjunctions between ground-space and space-space monitoring units c) tools to validate models d) on line implementation of models able to support space weather prediction services.

Space Weather Software Models are used to support analysis and forecasting of space weather phenomena and the effects of these phenomena on spacecraft and other critical infrastructure. Exploitation depends on efficient ICT infrastructure for coupling models and supporting heterogeneous execution; software, hardware and networks capable of supporting challenging CPU and communication requirements.

Recent developments in technology in cloud computing offer significant benefits such as flexibility and immediate scalability ("elasticity") that are particularly well suited to these challenges.

We will present the concepts, architecture and technology choices as interim results of a study being conducted for ESA on this topic. The overall objective of the study is to assess needs and define a blueprint for an ESA-wide cloud solution, comprising two layers:

- A common IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) in which the service provided to users consists of access to virtual servers, likely to be deployed as a combination of private and public cloud services. The technical solution is complemented by strong focus on security and governance aspects.

- A space weather Paas (Platform as a Service) built using IaaS services, which will provide developers with the building blocks and semantics for managing complex mathematical models and their data, the business logic to describe the processing sequence, handling scalability, fault tolerance, etc. in their applications.

Tools for forecasting geomagnetic storms and solar energetic particle (SEP) radiation storms have been developed under the three-year EU FP7 COMESEP (COronal Mass Ejections and Solar Energetic Particles) collaborative project. To enhance our understanding of the 3D kinematics and interplanetary propagation of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), the structure, propagation and evolution of CMEs have been investigated. In parallel, the sources and propagation of SEPs have been examined and modeled. During the third year of the COMESEP project the produced tools have been validated and implemented into an operational space weather alert system. The COMESEP alert system provides notifications for the space weather community. To achieve this the system relies on both models and data, the latter including near real-time data as well as historical data.
Geomagnetic and SEP radiation storm alerts are based on the COMESEP definition of risk. The COMESEP alert system is being launched during ESWW10 and will be demonstrated at the Fair. For more information see the project website (http://www.comesep.eu/). This work has received funding from the European Commission FP7 Project COMESEP (263252).

Space monitoring data center of Moscow State University provides operational information on radiation state of the near-Earth space. Complex, fully automated information system gives access to the actual data characterizing the level of solar activity, geomagnetic and radiation conditions of the magnetosphere and heliosphere via the Internet portal http://swx.sinp.msu.ru/ in the real time mode. The main components of the system are real-time data and the models of space environment. Operational data are coming from space experiments, both, Russian and foreign, on charged particle fluxes in energy channels from hundreds keV to hundreds MeV. The UV images of the Sun and solar wind parameters are also used in forecasting and now-casting. The models of the space environment working in an autonomous mode are used to generalize the information obtained from observations on the whole magnetosphere. Interactive applications and operational forecasting services are created on the base of these models. Velocities of high speed streams in solar wind on the Earth orbit are reconstructing with advance time of 3-4 days on the basis of automatic estimation of parameters of the coronal holes detected on the images of the Sun received from the SDO satellite. By means of neural network approach Dst-index online forecasting at 0.5-1.5 hours forward depending on solar wind and the interplanetary magnetic field, measured by ACE satellite is carrying out.

The Brazilian Space weather information and prediction Center (EMBRACE) was held in 2008, and today we provide several near real-time information on the ionosphere, geomagnetic fields, cosmic rays over the south America and solar radio wave radiations, in addition to the solar and interplanetary ambient conditions from the other space weather centers. The ground based sensors and receivers generate data with different volumes and different frequencies ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. Furthermore, there is a need of receiving such data in real time to perform the monitoring 24 hours per day,7 days per week. In order to support such a demand five applications were developed for receiving, processing and visualization of data from the instruments spread out over Brazil. These applications use an architecture based on components that interact asynchronously. In order to meet the requirements of performance, availability and fault tolerance was developed for components in a high performance system. This architecture is based on the replication of the components used by the application and the distribution of each component in a dedicated server. Virtual machines are used to enable the creation of multiple copies of components with servers and databases. The TI infrastructure of the center currently has 16 servers, each one with 16 processors and 32 GB of RAM. Furthermore, there is used an 32 TB for storing the virtual machines, raw data and database. All servers have CentOS 6 and virtualization is through native Linux solution, called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). We will summarize the operations and applications developed for our Space weather center.