Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms to support the creation of FAIR-compliant geospatial data

Abstract

It is becoming the new normal for earth scientists to combine global and decadal observations recorded by multiple international satellite missions with cutting edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods to answer the multitude of pressing questions of climate change. Earth Observation (EO) Exploitation Platforms, such as DLR’s terrabyte platform, support these scientists with the tools they need to let them concentrate on finding the answers. Those platforms can enable, simplify, and support scientists in producing and publishing findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible (FAIR) compliant geospatial data. This allows scientists to focus on the generation of global satellite data products, such as DLR’s World Settlement Footprint, Global SnowPack, or Global WaterPack. terrabyte is an innovative High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) platform operated by the DLR and the Leibniz Supercomputing Center (LRZ), an institution of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The platform provides researchers with efficient access to Earth Observation data, a powerful processing environment, and practical tools for data analysis in support of generating FAIR-compliant data. These tools include web services for the discovery of geospatial data in interoperable metadata catalogues, publishing data through DLR EOC’s Geoservice, best practice guidelines for sharing and publishing data, as well as interoperable services and tools for reproducible data science. With the ever-increasing Earth Observation data volumes, no single exploitation platform can serve all EO data. Thus, federation of platforms and interoperable services to serve FAIR-compliant data are key aspects in the future of EO-based data analysis. Together with international partners, such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), DLR is involved in activities to further evolve platform federation and interoperability. Examples are the OGC Open Science Persistent Demonstrator to share algorithms through executable web services as well as ESA’s EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture. Based on the common architecture developments, an interoperable software ecosystem is being provided to enable everyone to make use of standardized data discovery, data access, and reproducible data analyses (e.g., through ESA’s new initiatives EarthCODE and Application Propagation Environments as well as DLR terrabyte). On this poster, DLR-DFD’s services and activities around EO Exploitation Platforms are presented and linked to international activities of platform federations and interoperability to simplify, harmonize, and support the provision of FAIR-compliant geospatial data.