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