Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EOPEN (EOPEN: opEn interOperable Platform for unified access and analysis of Earth observatioN data)

Teaser

The overall objective of EOPEN is to provide a platform targeting non-expert EO data users (non-traditional user communities), experts and the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) community that reveals and makes Copernicus data and services easy to use for Big Data applications...

Summary

The overall objective of EOPEN is to provide a platform targeting non-expert EO data users (non-traditional user communities), experts and the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) community that reveals and makes Copernicus data and services easy to use for Big Data applications by providing EO data analytics services, decision making and infrastructure to support the Big Data processing life-cycle allowing the chaining of value adding activities across multiple platforms.
To successfully address the Big Data challenges and to benefit from the services provided by ICT companies for accessing and processing Copernicus data, we are developing the EOPEN platform which delivers Copernicus data to non-traditional user communities, applying data compression and storage of EO and non-EO data (i.e. meteorological data, social media, linked open data), using cloud infrastructure and high performance computing (HPC), in order to fuse data from diverse sources and from different modalities (e.g. visual, textual or spatiotemporal).
Indexing Sentinel high resolution (HR) images will be performed to ensure fast access to their related content and assists pattern recognition and machine learning techniques by boosting their performance when they rely on solid multimedia indexing techniques. Data management techniques, community detection and tracking on the network for visualisation of usage activities and network analytics to reveal the key players (public or private users) and groups of users (communities) in the EO domain will be performed. All these heterogeneous sources of information are combined, through multimodal fusion, to semantically interpret the content of EO data resulting in efficient decision-making and visualisation in line with the proposed Joint Decision and Information Governance Architecture.

Work performed

One of the main objectives of EOPEN is to fuse Sentinel data with multiple, heterogeneous and big data sources, to improve the monitoring capabilities of the future EO downstream sector.
Additionally, the use of mature ICT solutions in the Earth Observation sector shall address major challenges in effectively handling and disseminating Copernicus-related information to the wider user community, beyond the EU borders.
Processing of large streams of data is based on open-source and scalable algorithms of change detection, event detection, data clustering, which are built on High Performance Computing infrastructures.
Alongside this enhanced data fusion, a new innovative, overarching Joint Decision & Information Governance architecture will be combined with the technical solution to assist decision making and visual analytics in EOPEN.
Apart from EO product-oriented data management activities, EOPEN also exploits user-oriented feedback, tagging, tracking of interactions with other EOPEN users. EOPEN will be demonstrated in real Use Case scenarios in flood risk monitoring, food security and climate change monitoring
The work carried out during the first year of the project started with the analysis of the selected Use Cases and User Requirements which was followed by the system requirement and architecture to implement the first platform prototype.
The results of the Requirement analysis have been also considered to start the setup of a Joint Decision & Information Governance (JDIG) architecture aimed at identifying a Target Operating Model, starting for the Current Operating Model to support Decision Making.
Modules responsible have provided their feedback for core and extended functionalities; also, the latter have been mapped to Key Results as appearing in the proposal.
Deliverables
All the deliverables required for the first review have been uploaded as described in the Technical Report Part B.

Final results

The project was intended to address several potential impacts on the geo-spatial market. During the first review period, the following actions have been taken and the impact assessment is reported hereafter.

Impact expected: “Enable value adding services on generic data and information storage and processing facilities which can allow public and commercial users effective production environment to interact with and serve their user base without deploying their own storage and processing facilities.”

First Year assessment: EOPEN has been designed to offer services for end users to perform experiments on the data without having own storage and processing facilities. Connection to EC/ESA DIAS services is foreseen (integration on to ONDA IaaS to perform joint activities involving Serco, AAWA and-or external projects e.g. EGEOS E2mc)

Operational impact expected:“Make access to the Copernicus data and information easy and user friendly through scalable dissemination and exploitation software based on international standards.”

Impact expected:“Foster the establishment of interoperable access facilities to all EU Member States.”

Impact expected:“Establish a link with other big data initiatives.”

Impact expected:“Provide user community tools including best-practices”

Impact expected:“Ensure resilience of the overall dissemination and exploitation system.”

Impact expected:“Optimise the use of Copernicus data by non-traditional user communities to meet societal challenges.”

First Year assessment: the above programmatic aspects have been translated in system requirements. The resulting service design is expected ti significantly improve the existing operational chain of AAWA partner. In particular, on the occurrence of a disaster event (e.g. rain and wind storm which stroke the Veneto region at the end of October beginning of November 2018) the AAWA partner could have access to the data acquired under Copernicus EMS through the ESA CSCDA system and available crisis map available from that service with ground observation. Indeed capacity building was started early during the first year of the project envisaging the scenario of EOPEN platform usage either during the event or for flood risk assessment and prevention.

Societal Impact expected:
“Synergies among EOPEN and other consortia (e.g. H2020-MOSES) will broaden the end user community”

During the first reporting person the following specific actions have been taken:
-Poster presentation at ESA MWBS March 2018 Focusing on H2020 MOSES synergy and paper presentation at COWM November 2018, including section on H2020 MOSES
-COWM 2018 Conference presentation to a wide non-sectorial audience
-Capacity building, including connection to possible MOSES follow-up through the ESA HTEP platform



The proposed approach the maximize the EOPEN impact were in the first year mainly related to a proactive participation to workshops and stakeholder consultations. A dedicated User Requirement Meeting has been organized in April 11-12 Vicenza with a huge number of stakeholders.

Website & more info

More info: https://eopen-project.eu/.