EOX at GEO-VIII Exhibition (on OGC booth)

Istanbul, 16-17. 11 .2011
The Group on Earth Observation holds the GEO-VIII Plenary meeting. EOX is represented at the exhibition booth "GEOSS Infrastructure Enhancements" of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) presenting its EOxServer technology and how EOX uses OGC Services for ad-hoc analytics of Earth Observation data. In co-conference with Peter Baumann from rasdaman/Jacobs Univ. Bremen, Gerhard Triebnig, EOX Managing Director, will present the FP7 EarthServer project at  the OGC booth and the GEOSS AIP-4 Demos side event. The Geo-VIII Exhibition highlights some of the key contributions that GEO member governments and participating organizations are making to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).  

EarthServer - European Scalable Earth Science Service Environment

EOX plays a prominent role in the EarthServer project which aims at open access and ad-hoc analytics on Earth Science (ES) data, based on the OGC geo service standards Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS). The WCS model defines "coverages" as unifying paradigm for multi-dimensional raster data, point clouds, meshes, etc., thereby addressing most of Earth Science data. WCPS as aka "XQuery for raster data" allows declarative, SQL-style queries on coverages.

The project will develop a pilot implementing these standards, integrated with NetCDF and GeoSciML, two core formats used in the ESs, and open-source GIS tools. Integration of WCPS with XQuery will allow mixed data/metadata queries. The unified service will support navigation, extraction, aggregation, and ad-hoc analysis on massive n-D ES data through queries of open-ended complexity, achieving a flexibility on coverage data as it is known from SQL. Clients will range from mobile devices over Web tools to high-end immersive virtual reality.

In the RTD part, EarthServer will establish open-source client and server technology which is scalable to Petabyte/Exabyte volumes, based on distributed processing, supercomputing, and cloud virtualization. Implementation will be based on the existing rasdaman server technology developed by one partner, an operational system similar to SciDB.

In the Service part, this new service will be installed on super-scale archives of data centers serving atmospheric, oceanography, geology, and general earth observation communities. Queries can span archive sites and cross-domain data sets. Volumes of 20+ TB will be demoed.

In the Networking part, user training, community involvement and outreach, education of society (students, pupils, etc.) and public authorities, and standardization will be performed (e.g., OGC and INSPIRE). This novel quality of service, with its unified overarching retrieval, will enable new discoveries and enhanced collaboration, both ad-hoc and in "long tail science".

EOX holds the leading position in the Service Activity part.

EarthServer Project Site

Code Sprint to Establish Ad-hoc Earth Observation Processing

Bremen, 1. 8. 2011
Access to the wealth of Earth Observation data today still lacks flexible adaptation to user needs, satisfying performance of user-driven processing, and broad uptake of open standards. In a joint 3-day effort, international experts created a unique geo server, combining open-source components, which lifts ad-hoc analytics on Earth Observation data to a new dimension with respect to flexibility, performance, and usability.

From June 27 to June 29, a Code Sprint took place at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. Programming enthusiasts from five countries gathered to integrate the open-source geo servers EOxServer and rasdaman. Further open-source tools integrated include MapServer and GDAL. As a novelty, Earth Observation data now can be processed in an ad-hoc fashion, such as deriving vegetation information, image enhancement, and many more.

The combined server gathers, for the first time ever, the OGC standards WMS, WCS, EO-WCS, WCPS, and WPS in one package. EOxServer is an OGC Reference Implementation for WCS and EO-WCS, rasdaman is an OGC Reference Implementation for WCS and WCPS. A pre-installed Virtual Machine will be made available soon for free download from rasdaman.org and eoxserver.org.

Database and geo service specialists from Austria, China, Germany, Macedonia, Nigeria came to exchange about progress in OGC geo service standardization, to learn about the technologies of rasdaman and EOxServer, and ultimately to perform thorough implementation work for combining both tools into a powerful ad-hoc Earth Observation data analytics tool.

"Earth Observation service providers as well as their customers can benefit a lot from such open-source, open-standards based tools" says Stephan Meissl, CTO of EOX Austria and Principal Architect of EOxServer. Adds Peter Baumann, Professor at Jacobs University Bremen and Principal Architect of the rasdaman raster server, "such concrete tools contribute immensely to demonstrating the benefits of the open OGC standards to data providers". Both together have initiated this Code Sprint. They chair the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) Working Group and jointly develop and edit the respective standards documents. Peter Baumann also advises the European SDI initiative, INSPIRE, on raster issues.

EOxServer is a server for Earth Observation (EO) data. It implements latest Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) implementation specifications like the Web Coverages Service (WCS) 2.0 and its EO extension. EOxServer relies on an Open Source software stack including MapServer, GDAL, Python, etc. and is released under a MIT-style Open Source license itself. Work on EOxServer has been partly funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). Visit the EOxServer website at eoxserver.org.

Rasdaman ("raster data manager") is an array database system which allows storage and processing, through a database query language, of multi-dimensional arrays of unlimited size. Highly effective server-side optimizations make this system, which has received a series of innovation awards, outstandingly fast and scalable. Rasdaman is available on rasdaman.org.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 415 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC Standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.

The Code Sprint is part of OGC's OWS-8 activity, with sponsoring by ESA, NASA, and NGA, and the O3S project funded by ESA.

Contact:
Peter Baumann, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Stephan Meissl, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it