The Architecture and Data Committee (ADC) of the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations (GEO) is organizing a 2-day Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) Interoperability Workshop in Washington, D.C. The workshop is sponsored by the ADC’s Standards and Interoperability Forum (SIF) and aims to assess the current status of interoperability within GEOSS, review and amend SIF processes and procedures, engage new SIF participants, and develop recommendations for improving the interoperability landscape of GEOSS to meet the goal of having a fully functional and operational GEOSS by the 2010 GEO Ministerial Summit.
The workshop will cover a broad range of topics including processes for convergence on recommended standards for the GEOSS, interoperability aspects of data searching and access, frameworks for Earth system modeling, semantic interoperability, and partnerships and cooperative arrangements with other standards groups.

May 10, Germany
This one day workshop explored the status of existing ocean observation systems and data portals for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems – GEOSS. The discussion focused on the ability to build on existing systems to develop a global coordinated information and data system for ocean monitoring to better understand the dynamics of the deep-ocean processes throughout the ocean water column (ref GEO subtask CL-09-02d).
More info on and proceedings on:
http://www.ieee-earth.org/Conferences/GEOSSWorkshops#GEOSSWorkshopXXVII-Oceans
Download ESONET's presentation below or from the documents page

This is the first meeting of a two-meeting series to advance ocean systems semantic interoperability. (You may also wish to visit Part 2 of the Workshop Series.) In this meeting, we will do the planning and introductions to set the stage for the second, much larger meeting.

Background:

Currently, there are many vocabularies in use by different data systems in the IOOS community. This cacophony of vocabularies inhibits interoperability between data systems, as well as the ability of IOOS to operate as a whole, integrated system.