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EPOS is a long-term plan for the integration of existing national and trans-national research infrastructures for solid Earth science in Europe. By improving and facilitating the access, use, and re-use of multidisciplinary solid Earth science data, data products, services as well as physical access to facilities, EPOS is developing a federated and sustainable research platform to provide coordinated access to harmonized and quality-controlled data from diverse Earth science disciplines, together with tools for their use in analysis and modeling. EPOS fosters worldwide interoperability in Earth sciences and provides services to a broad community of users. In order to face such ambitious challenges, a complex functional architecture has been implemented to enable users to discover and select the data, download or visualize them, and perform processing over distributed resources in Europe. Particular attention is taken into metadata handling and intelligent management of distributed resources.