Virtual Earth Cloud: a multi-cloud framework for improving replicability of scientific models

Humankind is facing unprecedented global environmental and social challenges in terms of food, water and energy security, resilience to natural hazards, etc. To address these challenges, international organizations have defined a list of policy actions to be achieved in a relatively short and medium-term timespan (e.g., the UN SDGs). The development and use of knowledge platforms is key in helping the decision-making process to take significant decisions and avoid potentially negative impacts on society and the environment.

Scientific models are key tools to transform into information and knowledge the huge amount of data currently available online. Executing a scientific model (implemented as an analytical software) commonly requires the discovery and use of different types of digital resources (i.e. data, services, and infrastructural resources). In the present geoscience technological landscape, these resources are generally provided by different systems (working independently from one another) by utilizing Web technologies (e.g. Internet APIs, Web Services, etc.). In addition, a given scientific model is often designed and developed for execution in a specific computing environment. These are important barriers to enable reproducibility, replicability, and reusability of scientific models –becoming key interoperability requirements for a transparent decision-making process.

This presentation introduces the Virtual Earth Cloud concept, a multi-cloud framework for the generation of information/knowledge from Big Earth Data analytics. The Virtual Earth Cloud allows the execution of computational models to process and extract knowledge from Big Earth Data, in a multi-cloud environment, and thus improving their reproducibility, replicability and reusability.

The development and prototyping of the Virtual Earth Cloud is carried out in the context of the GEOSS Platform Plus (GPP) project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, aims to contribute to the implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) by evolving the European GEOSS Platform components to allow access to tailor-made information and actionable knowledge.