EOEPCA+: a method for an open-sourced EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture

The ‘Exploitation Platform’ concept derives from the need to access and process an ever-growing volume of data. Many web-based platforms have emerged - offering access to a wealth of satellite Earth Observation (EO) data, increasingly collocated with cloud computing resources and applications for exploiting the data. Rather than downloads, the exploitation platform offers a cloud environment with EO data access and associated compute and tools facilitating the analysis and processing of large data volumes. Users benefit from the scalability & performance of the cloud infrastructure, the added-value services offered by the platform – and avoid the need to maintain their own hardware. Data hosted in the cloud infrastructure reaches a wider audience and Infrastructure Providers gain an increased cloud user base.

Users are beginning to appreciate the advantages of exploitation platforms. However, the market now offers a plethora of platforms with various added value services and data access capabilities. This ever-increasing offer is intimidating and confusing for most users, often facing challenges such as inconsistent interfaces, proprietary software and limited interoperability. To fully exploit the potential of these complementary platform resources, interoperation amongst the platforms is needed, such that users of one platform may consume the services of another directly platform-to-platform.

EOEPCA (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture) is a European Space Agency (ESA) funded project with the goal to define and agree a re-usable exploitation platform architecture using standard interfaces to encourage interoperation and federation between operational exploitation platforms - facilitating easier access and more efficient exploitation of the rapidly growing body of EO and other data. Interoperability through open standards is a key guiding force for the Common Architecture. EOEPCA adheres to standards from organisations such as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follows best practices in data management, including implementation of OGC Web Services and emerging OGC API specifications for features, coverages and processes. Platform developers are more likely to invest their efforts in standard implementations that have wide usage; off-the-shelf clients and software are more likely to be found for standards-based solutions.

The EOEPCA system architecture is designed to meet defined use cases for various user levels(expert application developers to data analysts and end users). The architecture is defined as a set of Building Blocks (BBs), exposing well-defined open-standard interfaces. These include Identity and Access Management, Resource Discovery, Data Access, Processing Workflows, Data Cube Access, Machine Learning Operations, and more. Each of these BBs are containerized for Kubernetes deployment, providing an infrastructure-agnostic deployment target.

The exploitation platform is conceived as a ‘virtual work environment’,  withusers accessing data, developing algorithms, conducting analysis and sharing value-adding outcomes. The EOEPCA architecture facilitates this through a Workspace BB, providing collaboration environments for groups of users, including dedicated storage and services for analysis, processing and publishing of added-value data and applications. This is supported by an Application Hub BB, providing interactive web-tooling for analysis, algorithm development, data exploitation and providing a web dashboard capability, whereadded-value outcomes are showcased.

Our presentation will highlight the generalised architecture, standards, best practice and open source software components available.