Chandra Taposeea-Fisher
I have been working in the Earth Observation in some capacity since 2009, where I had an internship at ESA in The Netherlands. Since then, I have been a Young Graduate Trainee at ESA in Rome, completed a PhD in Numerical and Marine Geophysics from Imperial College London, and have been working full time in the Earth Observation sector since 2017. Now a Senior Project Manager at Telespazio UK, I have worked on primarily ESA projects, including a Digital Twin Earth for Food Systems precursor, EO4SD Lab, CCI Sea State, several Thematic Exploitation Platforms, the TRUTHS Satellite. I am project manager for both the EOEPCA+ and EarthCODE ESA projects, both having FAIR Open Science principles at their forefront.
Sessions
The ‘Exploitation Platform’ concept derives from the need to access and process an ever-growing volume of data. Many web-based platforms have emerged - offering access to a wealth of satellite Earth Observation (EO) data. Increasingly, these are collocated with cloud computing resources and applications for exploiting the data. Rather than downloading the data, the exploitation platform offers a cloud environment with access to EO data and associated compute and tools that facilitate the analysis and processing of large data volumes. The Exploitation Platform benefits users, data providers and infrastructure providers. Users benefit from the scalability & performance of the cloud infrastructure, the added-value services offered by the platform – and avoid the need to maintain their own hardware. Data hosted in the cloud infrastructure reaches a wider audience and Infrastructure Providers gain an increased cloud user base.
Users are beginning to appreciate the advantages of exploitation platforms. However, the market now offers a plethora of platforms with various added value services and data access capabilities. This ever-increasing offer is rather intimidating and confusing for most users. In order to fully exploit the potential of these complementary platform resources we anticipate the need to encourage interoperation amongst the platforms, such that users of one platform may consume the services of another directly platform-to-platform.
EOEPCA (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture) is a European Space Agency (ESA) funded project with the goal to define and agree a re-usable exploitation platform architecture using standard interfaces to encourage interoperation and federation between operational exploitation platforms - facilitating easier access and more efficient exploitation of the rapidly growing body of EO and other data. Interoperability through open standards is a key guiding force for the Common Architecture: platform developers are more likely to invest their efforts in standard implementations that have wide usage; off-the-shelf clients and software are more likely to be found for standards-based solutions.
The EOEPCA system architecture is designed to meet a set of defined use cases for various levels of user, from expert application developers to consumers. The architecture is defined as a set of Building Blocks (BBs), exposing well-defined open-standard interfaces. These include Identity and Access Management, Resource Discovery, Data Access, Processing Workflows, Data Cube Access, Machine Learning Operations, and more. Each of these BBs are containerized for Kubernetes deployment, which provides an infrastructure-agnostic deployment target.
The exploitation platform is conceived as a ‘virtual work environment’ where users can access data, develop algorithms, conduct analysis and share their value-adding outcomes. The EOEPCA architecture facilitates this through a Workspace BB that provides a user-centric platform experience in which the standard discovery, visualisation and access interfaces are re-used for user-owned resources maintained within the platform - including data, applications, added-value products (from processing), etc. This is supported by an Application Hub building-block that provides interactive web-tooling for analysis, algorithm development, data exploitation and provides a web dashboard capability through which added-value outcomes can be showcased.
Our presentation will highlight the generalised architecture, standards, best practice and open source software components available.