1. As the scientific community moves toward a more unified multidisciplinary approach to Earth observation in the 1990's. software engineers will face unprecedented challenges in developing information systems which can meet Earth scienceneeds. Our fundamentalchallengesare:
2. The collection of communications protocols known collectively as TCPAP was developed between 1973 and 1981 by the organization now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and then known as the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). TCP/IP was fist used on ARPANET, a network which first demonstrated the use of packet switching and which grew into a national U.S. backbone network and led to the develop of the Internet, a diversified world-wide network which is interconnected through TCPAP. Internet has grown exponentially since 1983,now connecting over 500 major networks, from 40,000to 500,000 computers, and from 500.000to over a million users. Through this one set of common standards a diverse, decentralized global communications culture has arisen which connects nearly every major academic center and countless government and commercial organizations. An impressive description of this culture can be found in [Quarterman 19901.
3. Since the introduction of the Macintosh computer in 1983,Apple Computer Corporation has rigidly enforced a set of standards for application program and user interface development across its group of third party software developers (the Macintosh Toolkit). Much of this enforcement has been with the incentives of documentation and consulting support, performance advantages associated with efficient implementation of user interface and graphics routines in the Macintosh ROM, and with the promise of compatibility with future hardware upgrades. The value of adhering to these standards was clearly proven when Apple introduced the Macintosh 11 computer and many vendors who had bypassed the Macintosh Toolkit interface standards to directly access hardware to improve execution speed discovered that their software no longer worked on platforms with vastly improved perfor-Foundation's Motif). However, it would be inappropriate to rigidly standardize methods of data presentation since experimentation with data visualization is an inherentlyimportant part of EOSDIS.