EGU25-17326, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17326
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
The UK EO DataHub - a pathfinder programme to develop a data space for UK industry, public and academic sectors
Philip Kershaw1,2, Rhys Evans1, Fede Moscato1,2, Dave Poulter1, Alex Manning1, Jen Bulpett1, Ed Williamson1,2, John Remedios2,5, Alastair Graham3, Daniel Tipping3, and Piotr Zaborowski4
Philip Kershaw et al.
  • 1STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, RAL Space, Didcot, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (philip.kershaw@stfc.ac.uk)
  • 2National Centre for Earth Observation, Space Park Leicester, Leicester, UK
  • 3Oxidian, Ltd
  • 4Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.
  • 5Leicester University, Leicester, UK

The EO DataHub is a new national data space which has been under development as part of a two-year pathfinder programme to facilitate the greater exploitation of EO data for UK industry, public sector and academia. The project has been led by the UK National Centre for Earth Observation partnered with public sector bodies, the UK Space Agency, Met Office, Satellite Applications Catapult and National Physical Laboratory and enlisting commercial suppliers for the development and delivery of the software.

The Hub joins a crowded space in this sector as it joins a growing number of similar such platforms. However, as a national platform (with government as an anchor tenant) it is seeking to provide a unique offering as a trusted source of data, integrating curated data products from the science community building on UK strengths in climate research.

The architecture can be considered as a three layer model. At the base layer, different data sources are integrated - both commercial (Airbus and Planet Labs) and academic providers - from the CEDA data archive (https://archive.ceda.ac.uk) hosted on the JASMIN supercomputer (https://jasmin.ac.uk). The data catalogue now includes high and very high resolution SAR and optical products, Sentinel, UK Climate Projections, CMIP (https://wcrp-cmip.org), CORDEX (https://cordex.org) and outputs from EOCIS (https://eocis.org) consisting of a range of satellite-derived climate data products.

The middle layer, the Hub Platform provides services and APIs including federated search which integrates the data from the various providers, image visualisation, a workflow engine, user workspaces and interactive analysis environments. These build on the work of ESA's EOEPCA (https://eoepca.org) and apply open standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium and STAC (https://stacspec.org/) for cataloguing. In providing this suite of services, the goal is to provide a toolkit to facilitate application developers and EO specialists in building new applications and tools to exploit the data. This forms the final layer in the architecture: as part of the programme, three example application scenarios have been funded, each partnered with a target set of users. These include 1) an application taking climate projections and land surface temperature datasets to provide risk assessments for land assets (led by SparkGeo); 2) a land cover application (Spyrosoft) and finally 3), rather than an application in its own right, a project to develop a client toolkit for use with Jupyter Notebooks and a plugin integrating the Hub’s functionality into the open source GIS desktop application QGIS (work led by Oxidian).

Over the course of the programme, running in parallel to the system development, a dedicated study has been undertaken to develop a model for future sustainability of the platform tackling engagement with potential users and cost models. At the beginning, a funding call seeded early pilots to investigate application scenarios that the platform could support. As this initial phase of the Hub completes, work is underway to engage with early adopters and provide training resources for new users.

How to cite: Kershaw, P., Evans, R., Moscato, F., Poulter, D., Manning, A., Bulpett, J., Williamson, E., Remedios, J., Graham, A., Tipping, D., and Zaborowski, P.: The UK EO DataHub - a pathfinder programme to develop a data space for UK industry, public and academic sectors, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-17326, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-17326, 2025.