Open-Earth-Monitor Global Workshop 2026

Acknowledging the value of earth observation data and sharing the frustration in the difficulty of working with it, just shy of 10 years ago a group of earth observation scientists and practitioners set out to described their vision (https://r-spatial.org/2016/11/29/openeo.html) of how they would like to work with this treasure of data without falling into the traps of a vendor lock-in, custom codes for data access and the need to deal with 15 different data formats. Inspired by the way gdal solved the latter of these problems for raster data driven GIS systems, they envisioned an API agnostic to both the clients programming language and the server site implementation of EO processing workflows. I joined this group of like-minded researchers in the Horizon 2020 project openEO that was funded about a year after.
During this keynote I will talk about the importance of open-source development and community building in conjunction with the importance of public funding from the European Commission and the European Space Agency as the two main supporters of making this idea a reality. OpenEO is based on an approach of co-design and co-development, involving both earth observation data analysts and researchers as well as software developers and industry service providers right from the start. It is now available as part of many operational service offerings, such as openEO platform, the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem and Destination Earth. openEO is not only the foundation of individual service offerings, but even federations of multiple implementations, sharing data and processing resources leveraging efficient interoperability based on cloud native data formats and harmonized specifications for, data discovery, access, processing and sharing of results. It is fully embracing the FAIR data principles, while supporting researchers and data analyst to focus on what the want to do instead of how the implementations needs to be optimized for modern scalable data infrastructures.