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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DCS4COP (DataCube Service for Copernicus)

Teaser

Summary

The Data Cube Service for Copernicus (DCS4COP) project aims at establishing a new service model, integrating Sentinel data, Copernicus Service data and user supplied data in a Data Cube-based system. The offer will comprise Processing as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), consultancy and training, all from one source. The service is targeting the value-adding Earth Observation industry and public organisations, i.e. intermediate business users (IBU), at highly competitive costs.
Capitalising on the scientific achievements of the FP-7 funded HIGHROC research project, a coastal and inland water service named EODataBee will demonstrate the value of satellite Earth Observation data for this challenging market segment. Currently, this market is largely underexploited due to market blockages and offers a large growth potential. The combination of access to high quality data, wide selection of thematic Data Layers, state-of-the-art tools, unrivalled expertise in the coastal domain and cutting-edge IT solutions, will allow customers to concentrate on their value-adding business and to optimise their costs. In particular, customers will tailor their solution by selecting from a portfolio of different services including visualisation, API access, virtual laboratory, direct data access and integrate it into their business processes.
A key feature of the EODataBee technical solution is flexibility and independence from specific infrastructure requirements. It can be deployed on the user side, or on European cloud infrastructure, e.g. the Copernicus Data and Information Access Service (DIAS), or on national collaborative ground segments, as well as on commercial infrastructure.
EODataBee is attractive to customers, because it offers a high-quality turn-key solution at affordable costs. It has therefore a large potential to boost the value-adding market and expand its reach to many companies and organisations; we will create a multiplier effect for Copernicus-based services offered to end users. This amplification enables the EODataBee to offer their service at low costs while keeping sufficient margin for further service development and revenues.

Work performed

The project is organised in three phases of twelve months each, namely the Set-up, Demonstration, and Market Introduction.
The main tasks in in the first twelve months, i.e. the Set-up phase, have been related to preparatory works required for achieving the readiness to operate the planned Data Cube service. The team thus engaged particularly in software development and service implementation to generate the Data Cubes and to offer different services like visualisation or virtual laboratories with the Data Cubes. In addition, the list of input data has been consolidated and prioritised and high priority data sets, e.g. for water quality, have been either generated by the team or acquired from Copernicus services. With the software solution and the data at hand, a first generic use case has been implemented end-to-end, i.e. from gathering input data to providing the service to users.
Tailored trainings and consultancy will complement the information service. To this end, the plan and standards for these service components have been developed in initial versions. Finally, validation plans for the Data Layers as well as the service itself have been created to ensure the high quality of EODataBee.
Besides the technical work, a market analysis has been initiated to better understand the market of coastal and inland water services. In parallel the business model has been refined, also with the interim results of the market analysis. Moreover, the team worked on the branding and the visual identity of the service under development. The EODataBee name and logo (see attached graphics) are the results of this activity.

Final results

The DCS4COP project aims at the development of a value-adding water quality service which removes the technical barrier experienced by many intermediate users when dealing with large amounts of complex data.
At the heart of the EODataBee services, the high-resolution water colour products from HIGHROC offer information on the heterogeneous and dynamic coastal, river, and lake environments at highest scientific quality (Ruddick et al., 2016), The water quality information offered through EODataBee has considerable competitive advantages over standard products currently offered by Copernicus and other coastal services in terms of accuracy and resolution, both in time and space, achieved by leveraging the most recent multi-sensor and multi-algorithm developments from HIGHROC.
EODataBee will thus open entirely new, commercial application areas including support for dredging, windfarm construction and operation, aquaculture and feature detection. These regions of interest were previously inaccessible because of the limitations in spatial resolution of MERIS and Sentinel-3 OLCI. The operational potential of these satellite-based water quality products will be maximized in EODataBee through increased accessibility to the ocean colour products integrated with other oceanography data sources (e.g. numerical models and in situ data). This greatly facilitates a holistic understanding of aquatic systems and increases the range of use casesâ€“ and thus potential customers â€“ for the service.
Until the end of the project, we therefore expect to attract several paying users of the service with sophisticated use cases requiring the integration of high-quality coastal data from different sources. Many of them wouldnâ€™t have been feasible for technical or economic reasons without EODataBee and therefore considerably extend the applications for Earth Observation in a challenging environment.