The Urban TEP - Processing, Analysis and Visualization of Multi-Source and Large-Volume Data for Scientific Research and Urban Applications

Kurzfassung

Urbanization and climate change, representing two of the most relevant global trends related to the human presence on the planet, challenge our environmental, societal and economic development. The availability of and access to accurate, detailed and up-to-date information will impact decision making processes all over the world. The suite of the Copernicus Sentinel satellites in combination with their free and open access data policy contributes to a spatially and temporally detailed monitoring of the Earth’s surface. At the same time a multitude of additional sources of open geo-data is available - e.g., from other earth observation (EO) missions (Landsat, etc.), from national or international statistics or land surveying offices, volunteered geographic information or social media. Detailed and reliable information on global human settlements can directly contribute to the monitoring and decision making regarding the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and provides relevant data for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), specifically SDG 11, as well as other global and national policy frameworks. However, the capability to effectively and efficiently access, process, and jointly analyze the heterogeneous and often large-volume data collections poses a key technical challenge. The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (U-TEP) is developed to provide end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions for a broad spectrum of users (scientists, researchers, planners and policy-/decision makers) to extract unique information/ indicators required for urban management and sustainability. Key components of the system are an open, web-based portal connected to distributed high-level computing infrastructures and providing key functionalities for: i) high-performance data access and processing, ii) modular and generic state-of-the art pre-processing, analysis, and visualization, iii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services, and iv) networking and communication. U-TEP aims at opening up new opportunities to facilitate effective and efficient urban management and the safeguarding of livable cities by systematically exploring the unique EO capabilities in Europe in combination with the big data perspective arising from the constantly growing sources of geo-data. The capabilities of participation and sharing of knowledge by using new media and ways of communication will help to boost interdisciplinary applications with an urban background. The services and functionalities are supposed to enable any interested user to easily exploit and generate thematic information on the status and development of the environment based on EO data and technologies. In order to assure sustainable developments, U-TEP follows an Open Source strategy committing that the platform is based on Open Source components and modules, with an online presence at the world's leading software development platform GitHub (https://github.com/urban-tep). U-TEP provides access to various new products, such as the TimeScan layer, geotagged Tweets, the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) and its successor the World Settlement Footprint (WSF), as well as datasets of other research groups (Nighlights, WorldPop, etc.). Moreover, U-TEP provides processing services that the users can deploy applications to conduct analyses or generate certain products on-demand. U-TEP’s TimeScan on-demand service, for instance, has already been used to successfully generate three global TimeScan layers for 2015, 2010 and 2000 from a total of more than one million Landsat images (Esch et al. 2018). The production was solely based on an implementation of the TimeScan on-demand service at the HPC cluster of U-TEP’s IT4I processing center. The resulting TimeScan-Landsat layers are available at U-TEP’s Geobrowser (https://urban_tep.eo.esa.int/geobrowser/?id=portfolio#!&context=TimeScan%2FLandsat). U-TEP recently successfully completed its development phase and entered a pre-operational phase. The user feedback and the lessons learnt from the 8-months pre-operations phase, identified some key properties and functionalities that can be considered as major determinates for the usability, benefit and attractiveness of an instrument such as U-TEP. A systematic enhancement and streamlining of the platform capabilities and product/service functionalities will be conducted until Q2 2019 and will enable the operational phase of the platform. However, the innovative character of U-TEP platform in terms of available data and processing and analysis functionalities attracted already a large user community (>340 users and institutions from >40 countries) of diverse users (i.a. from science, public institutions, NGOs, industry) so far.