The China GEO Data Center Bringing order to open Earth-observation data jITAO YAnG AnD GuOQInG LI n umerous remote-sensing devices observe the Earth every day, generating large amounts of remotesensing images and metadata. The extensive Earth o b s e r v a t i o n (E O) d a t a made ava ilable on t he Internet by different EO agencies in multiple countries pose challenges for integration, storage, access, and collaborative applications. The capacity to explore and utilize all these heterogeneous EO data from across the world is very limited. In this article, we introduce the China Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Data Center, which is devoted to the efficient integration of EO data on the Internet and opening China's EO data to the world. We describe the infrastructure of the China GEO Data Center and discuss the design and implementation of the China Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). We demonstrate the use of the GEO discovery and access broker (DAB) to harvest the large amounts of open EO data brokered by Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2017.2682563 Date of publication: 8 June 2017 june 2017 ieee Geoscience and remote sensinG maGazine ©GRAPH IC STOCK the GEO from different agencies around the world. We describe a data model we have designed to express the relations among EO data and capture the implicit semantic knowledge in EO data through rules (a model implemented using the Apache Jena framework). Finally, we describe the mechanisms for opening China's EO data to the world. BaCkGRound Data from EO remote sensing devices and satellites have been growing rapidly in volume and diversity [1], and a 0274-6638/17©2017IEEE 77