Point of view: Long-Term access to Earth Archives across Multiple Disciplines

•We report standardization activities on multi-disciplinary Earth System Science.•We propose the standardization across multiple disciplines in long term.•We consider the application of the knowledge base concept to facilitate data interpretation.•Both common and domain requirements are considered.•Knowledge gap issues between the source and target communities are addressed.

Without an approach accepted by the communities at large, domain disagreements will continue to thwart current global efforts to harmonize information models. The research presented here reviewed current standardization activities. A number of observations and possible solutions are proposed to address the topic of standardizing long term access to multi-discipline Earth System archives by considering the application of the knowledge base concept to facilitate data interpretation. Finally, we present a case study as an initial entry point for the further discussion about standardization.