ESA offers, freely downloadable from its website, the Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA) manual that provides a high level view on the results of several years of harmonisation and standardisation work in the critical area of ground segment interoperability of Earth Observation (EO) satellite missions.
The European space has coordinated efforts with downstream industries, research centres, agencies and institutions to successfully address the interoperability problem of EO Systems. This refers to how the societal, scientific and commercial values of EO Systems depend on whether or not their data and services can be readily published, discovered, assessed, processed and used by a broad set of users.
The publication of HMA promoted standards within the Open Geospatial Consortium has contributed to provide operational and sustainable user services, helped to avoid unnecessary duplication in technologies, and to establish a well-coordinated, cost effective and increasingly automated operations scenario.
