IMPROVING THE AVAILABILITY AND USABILITY OF PLANETARY SPATIAL DATA RESEARCH BY SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE OF CELESTIAL BODIES MODELING

The rapid development of space technology and the increased interest in space exploration have resulted in the intensifying of observation of celestial bodies, mostly in the solar system, over the past decade with the prospect of an upward trend in the future. Data collected by space missions are stored and provided to users for use through the archives of individual space agencies and specialized portals of space missions. Users often encounter many problems when searching and retrieving data of interest, despite the fact that access to data is open for all groups of users. Current ways of storing and shearing this valuable data set are focused on their long-term archiving and are largely adapted for space scientists with inadequate access and search functionalities that do not meet the needs of a wider group of users. To search for data, users must have some prior knowledge and invest a lot of time and effort, and the available functionalities gives too many of the same or similar data filtering results that, in most cases, cannot be visualized before downloading. For this reason, the data remains unused, and in order to solve this problem, large amounts of collected data on space bodies, of which most are spatially defined, impose the need to develop the spatial data infrastructure of celestial bodies (SDICB) at the general level in order to enable standardized organization and storage of these data, and their efficient use and exchange. In order to approach to the development of such an infrastructure, it is necessary to investigate what data, as well as how and to what extent, are collected through the space observation, either from Earth, Earth orbit or from space probes. It is also necessary to investigate how this data can be obtained and to explore concepts of spatial data infrastructure, the possibilities of its establishment and operationalization. This doctoral dissertation provides a detailed overview of current ways of storing and distributing space research data and their shortcomings and explores the possibility of modeling the establishment of SDICB. In order to adequately approach the development of the model, user needs assessment and analysis of the current data archiving situation was conducted. These results served as input parameters for modeling SDICB and the adoption of guidelines (recommendations) for the establishment. The proposed model is focused on user needs and improving the functionality of data access by applying international standards of spatial data and open-source technologies to make space data available to the general public and enable their easy search, download and interpretation. For the proposed model, an implementation project with a five-year implementation period was created, for which a feasibility study was conducted, and the benefits of SDICB implementation for all involved stakeholders were investigated.