Earth system science (ESS) research is generally very data intense. To enable detailed discovery and transparent access of the data stored in heterogeneous and organisationally separated data centres common data and metadata community interfaces are needed. This paper describes the development of a coherent data discovery and data access infrastructure for the ESS community in Germany. To comprehensively and consistently describe the characteristics of geographic data, required for their discovery (discovery metadata) and for their usage (use metadata) the ISO standard 19115 is adopted. Webservice technology is used to hide the details of heterogeneous data access mechanisms and preprocessing implementations. The commitment to international standards and the modular character of the approach facilitates the expandability of the infrastructure as well as the interoperability with international partners and other communities
