Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) architecture is a resource for meeting needs in public and environmental health. It is an international cooperative effort to bring together existing and new hardware, software, data and services, making these compatible and widely accessible at minimal cost for social and environmental programmes. This article discusses the various aspects of this endeavour

Despite best efforts at planning, there is always chaos after a disaster. Rescuers must race against time to discover locations and details of the many follow-on difficulties and emergencies confronted by individual disaster victims. Under these circumstances, rapid development and communication of geospatial information is critical in recovery efforts, including efforts to maintain public health.
In late July and early August, 2005 more than 26 inches of rainfall was recorded as a powerful monsoon swept Mumbai and most of the state of Maharashtra in India. Among the many difficulties that ensued was an outbreak of leptospirosis. Leptospirosis (Weil’s Disease) is a bacterial infection that spreads from the urine of infected animals to humans, often through water. It does not spread from human to human.

This leptospirosis outbreak provided the use case for a demonstration at a September, 2006 ISRO/ISPRS/IEEE/OGC Workshop in Goa, India, titled, "The User and the GEOSS Architecture VI - Applications in Public Health for The Indian Ocean Region." This one-day workshop focussed on the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) architecture as a resource for meeting needs in public and environmental health. GEOSS and the GEOSS architecture have been developed in the last few years by the international Group on Earth Observations (GEO). The workshop provided a forum for discussing the benefits and challenges of the GEOSS advanced open global network of geospatial resources applied to drinking water quality and telemedicine.

The demonstration system was developed by University College London’s Department of Geomatic Engineering and Comsine Ltd. A number of organisations provided data or support for the system, including ML Infomap, the Mumbai Freemap project, Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University (CIESIN), the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information & Analysis (NCGIA), the European Union Joint Research Centre (JRC), MDA Geospatial Services, European Space Agency (ESA), U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), SPOT Image, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), OGC, and International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Commission IV. UCL’s ICEDS system was developed in association with ESYS plc and with funding from the British National Space Centre’s International Co-operation Programme 2. Comsine’s PDA system was also developed with BNSC ICP-2 funding..