Modern large datasets lay the foundation for our understanding of the world, regardless of if we’re utilizing traditional statistical approaches or applying modern AI/ML approaches. In recent years, the terrestrial data being collected by governmental organizations, research and NGOs is being increasingly complemented through products generated from remote sensing missions, leading to an increasingly rich set of derived products. The European strategy to support such efforts is a vision of Common European Data Spaces, that will make more data available for access and reuse. In addition to prioritizing personal data protection, consumer safeguards, there is a strong focus on upholding the FAIR principles. However, the requirements for enabling FAIR use of this data remain the same, all data must be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. While great advances have been made in making data stemming from terrestrial data acquisition activities FAIR, there seems to be a bit of a lag pertaining to products generated from satellite data, unfortunately hindering FAIR access. This pertains to the following aspects of FAIR:
- Findable: provision of rich metadata as required to both identify relevant datasets and fully understand their provenance, in order to determine applicability to a specific endeavor
- Accessible: at present there are diverse web services and APIs tailored for provision of raw satellite data; these data access approaches show deficits when dealing with derived products
- Interoperable: related to the accessibility issue stated above, the formats utilized for raw satellite data are not sufficient for derived products, standardized interchange formats need to be tailored to this purpose
- Reusable: tools are available for analysis and processing of gridded data, but are often not aware of caveats entailed by the nature of available datasets.
Within this session, jointly organised by 4 European projects (AD4GD, USAGE, FAIRiCUBE and BCUBED), we will be bringing examples of international initiatives that aim to resolve these issues and increase the FAIRness of the ever increasing amount of data being made available from diverse sources. This will help to guide the creation of the European Dataspaces, bringing them to their full potential in supporting both policy and society in facing future challenges.