The idea for this book arose out of the development of Geoinformatics as a research emphasis in the Division of Earth Sciences at the U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that was fostered by Dr. Herman Zimmerman over a decade ago. This development was coincident with the creation of the Information Technology Research (ITR) for National Priorities program at NSF. Thus, the content of this book features several papers based on research that was inspired and/or funded as a result of these developments. Geoinformatics is certainly not a term or concept that is the invention of the U. S. earth sciences community, and this book also features chapters by authors from nine different countries. In addition, most chapters are the result of research in which geoscientists and computer scientists work together to solve complex scientific questions. This research involves topics such as data systems and models, data integration, advanced computer simulations, visualization, ontologies, workflows, webservices, and international cooperation.

Over most of the past decade, we have been supported by the National Science Foundation to pursue research in Geoinformatics primarily through the GEON (Geosciences Network) project, and we gratefully acknowledge this support. GEON was not created in a vacuum. A number of distributed and grid computing-based projects were in early stages at the time that GEON was originally conceived, including the Grid Physics Network (GriPhyN), funded by the US National Science Foundation and other agencies; the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (BIRN), funded by the National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) at the US National Institutes for Health; and the Southern California Earthquake Consortium's Common Modeling Environment (CME), which was also funded by an NSF ITR grant.