Cloud-based services support users in viewing, downloading, and analysing geospatial data. Many of these web-based services expand their functionalities to provide advanced data processing tools, online data repositories, interactive and collaborative computing environment for creating and sharing live code. Over the last two decades, the larger EO sector has seen many cloud services and EO Platforms come and go. A few solutions have prevailed, and a set of technologies today are finding widespread adoption. Recent geospatial platforms are designing their services to function as a digital ecosystem, where integrated services now communicate with a network of interconnected web-services, building on the concept of federations. Therefore, this distributed infrastructure can offer much more and to a larger range of customers with different skills (e.g., service consumers and service providers).
For example, Destination Earth (or DestinE) is an initiative of the EC’s DG-CNECT, for developing and exploiting a highly accurate digital model of the Earth, with the objectives of monitoring and predicting the interactions between natural phenomena and human activities. DestinE Platform (platform.destine.eu) integrates and operates an open ecosystem of services to support users to exploit a large portfolio of Earth Science data, including high-resolution data from ECMWF’s Digital Twins, and create services and applications on top of them.
Other relevant platform is openEO. At its core it comprises a set of processes, client libraries, and used with a REST API and a set of predefined endpoints. OpenEO allows abstracting complex EO workflows to be executed in different cloud environments. Initially openEO API was supported by H2020 funding, now the operation is under ESA funding (openeo.cloud). Several additional industry owned and operated openEO supporting backends exist today, forming a larger federation of resources.
EarthCode, an open-source architecture leveraging EOEPCA+, builds on top of existing EO cloud services to serve the downstream Earth Science community. It aims to make FAIR and Open Science practice, offering tools for the management of FAIR data and code, long-term access to community-developed scientific results, and cross-platform reproducible implementations of scientific algorithms.
This session invites all types of platform providers and users to evidence the benefits of any kind of cloud-based services for geospatial activities.