UrbanTEP – a Collaborative Work Environment for EO Service Providers, Urban Researchers and User Communities

Abstract

Urbanization is one of the key global challenges and affects the environment, as well as health and socio-economic development of a majority of the global population. It is also a major contributor to climate change. Collaborative efforts are needed in order to mitigate the negative impacts of urbanization on the one hand, but on the other hand to understand how to take advantage of opportunities that arise out of this process. Platform based initiatives have proven to be game changing technologies, which are capable of revolutionizing service provision, workflows and products. The Urban Thematic Exploitation Platform (UrbanTEP; urban-tep.eu) is a collaborative system, which focuses on the processing of earth observation (EO) data and delivering multi-source information on trans-sectoral urban challenges. The UrbanTEP is developed to provide end-to-end and ready-to-use solutions for a broad spectrum of users (service providers, expert and non-expert users and researchers) to extract unique information/ indicators required for urban planning, urban management and sustainable development. Key components of the system are an open, web-based portal connected to distributed and scalable high-level computing infrastructures and providing key functionalities for i) high-performance data access and processing (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service), ii) modular and generic state-of-the art pre-processing, analysis, and visualization tools and algorithms (SaaS – Software as a Service), iii) customized development and sharing of algorithms, products and services (PaaS – Platform as a Service), and iv) networking and communication. The service and product portfolio of UrbanTEP provides access to several EO product archives (e.g. Copernicus, Landsat, etc.), as well as premium products like the World Settlement Footprint (WSF) and of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI). The platform provides access to the Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (DIAS) processing environments. A cooperation with the Euro Data Cube allows users and service providers to make use of data cube technology and customized City Data Cubes enable user communities to derive actionable information from extensive EO-datasets. External service providers, as well as researchers can make use of on-demand processing of new data products and the possibility of developing and deploying new processors. The onboarding of service providers, developers and researchers is supported by the Network of Resources program of ESA and the OCRE initiative of the European Commission. In order to provide end-to-end solutions, the Visualization and Analysis Tool (VISAT) on UrbanTEP allows analyzing and visualizing project-related geospatial content and to develop storylines to enhance the transport of research output to customers and stakeholders effectively. Multiple visualizations (scopes) are already predefined and cover a wide range of applications like land-use monitoring, urban climate modelling, functional urban areas, population development and ecosystem accounting. One available scope exemplary illustrates the exploitation of the WSF-Evolution dataset by analyzing the settlement and population development for South-East Asian countries from 1985 to 2015 in the context of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11.3.1 indicator.