The term data cube as it relates to Big Earth Data has recently gained a lot of attention. The data cube concept promises to tackle some of the challenges associated with serving and consuming large volumes of environmental data. Data cubes offer a more on-demand and analysis-ready access to n-dimensional data, that can be accessed along any axis, allowing for efficient trim or slice operations. The data cube concept makes large volumes of environmental and geospatial data more manageable and thus, increases the general uptake of Big Earth data.

Even though the principle data cube concept is not new, the application to Big Earth Data entails quite a few challenges: to enable interoperability between different data providers or combining data from domain-specific data formats, with different spatial and temporal resolutions and different coordinate systems. The success of data cubes for Big Earth Data relies on the cooperation of data cube technology providers, data users and large data organisations in the future. A better understanding of the challenges large data organisations face and the needs data users have is helpful for the future development of data cube technologies.

This session aims to establish a dialogue between data cube technology providers, data users and large data organisations. A particular focus will be set on technical data cube solutions from current data cube initiatives, on challenges large data organisations face and how a data cube service could be of benefit and on requirements data users make in order to benefit from the data cube paradigm most.