Data plays a crucial role in driving innovation and making informed decisions. The European strategy for data is a vision of data spaces that foster creativity and open data, while prioritizing personal data protection. The sheer quantity of Earth Observation (EO) data available has huge potential, but is also challenging to handle with traditional workflows and infrastructures. Extracting full value from datasets provided by government, international organizations, and the private sector require novel approaches to data access.
New data spaces are being developed in Europe, such as the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and Green Deal Data Space, as well as multiple national data spaces. These provide access to data, through streamlined access, on-board processing and online visualization generating actionable knowledge and supporting more effective decision-making. Global EO datasets and space research monitoring data can be accessed via API, creating analysis ready data for machine learning applications. In unison, these advances in data availability, and processing capacity are transformative for geoscience research and industry.
However, building these data spaces is often challenging. Geographically, there is significant variation in policy surrounding data sharing, privacy, public-private partnerships, and intellectual property leading to variation in the design and implementation of data spaces. Moreover, there are major technical challenges to the operating data spaces, including the rapid development of computing power and differences in the features between traditional and cloud-based IT systems. Finally, there are cultural challenges, as potential users are often reluctant to embrace new technologies. Therefore, we need a deeper understanding of data spaces; their design, creation, integration, and examine how they can optimize and improve workflows.
This session connects developers and users of data spaces, showing how these systems facilitate the sharing, integration, and flexible processing of geographic data from diverse sources. We invite contributions from non-earth science-based data spaces to share the lessons they have learned that are relevant for EO data spaces and their users too, as well as projects in their infancy. The speakers will discuss how ongoing efforts to build data spaces will connect with existing initiatives on data sharing and processing, and present examples of innovative services that can be built upon data spaces.