Incentivising open science through powerful free and open tooling

Development Seed and our partner’s vision is that FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data, a key ingredient to open science, is not an afterthought, but how scientists handle their data in the first place.

Our experience is that appealing, powerful, and free tools for data discovery and access that are readily available incentivise data science practitioners to organise their data in interoperable formats and cataloguing as part of their workflows. 

This talk gives an overview of recent advances in open source tools that Development Seed and our partners are supporting and our experience with their application in platforms such as those powered by the ESA-funded EOEPCA+ software, sister projects NASA/ESA MAAP and NASA VEDA, and the data platform source.coop.

After more than a decade of success with cloud-optimised data formats such as Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF (and recently also Zarr-based variants) and dynamic server-side rendering of data, latest advances focus on client-side access to STAC catalogues in geoparquet format and GPU-powered rendering of web-optimised datasets in the browser, to make the benefits available also in environments where centralised services are not available, and reduce the infrastructure maintenance costs.