INTRODUCTION

The Ministerial Summit held in Geneva on January 17, 2014, emphasized the importance of user needs as a motivation for GEO. In their guidance for GEO, they stated that one of the five key focus areas of activity is to “Develop a comprehensive interdisciplinary knowledge base defining and documenting observations needed for all disciplines and facilitate availability and accessibility of these observations to user communities.”

In response to the minsterial guidance, the Socio-Economic and Environmental Information Needs Knowledge Base (SEE-IN KB is under development. This knowledge base replaces the GEOSS User Requirement Registry (URR), which is being redesigned to have a more versatile data model and extended to provide more functionality.