Earth Observation Big Data, BDVA Workshops

Earth Observation (EO) is one of the domains benefiting from huge volumes of data, especially given COPERNICUS Programme and the EU open data policy. The opportunities that these data offer to multiple domains are not fully known and understood by people outside the EO community. Therefore, awareness raising initiatives are important to promote the use of EO data to different other communities and, in addition, collaboration is still needed between the EO and IT experts to exploit at maximum the information that can be found within the present overwhelming amount of EO data.

There is a lot of interest from the IT area in EO domain, that was proven by the high number of participants at the last parallel EO session organized in Valencia within the BDVA summit in 2017 (the highest number of participants from all the parallel sessions). But, even if, lately, the contact between the two communities has started and several initiatives were started, there is still a gap and a lack of coordination between them.

Therefore, the ultimate objective of the present session is to bring the IT community closer to EO, for a common understanding of the related challenges and market opportunities, and to find complementarities and synergies to tackle the respective challenges. A ‘Earth Observation Big Data White Paper’ was drafted by the working Subgroup for EO within BDVA, highlighting the most important aspects related to big data in EO that the people working in the domain have to face, the impact that this big data can have in different economic sectors, and the needs that can be covered by the IT community in the view of better exploitation of this data. The respective document is foreseen to be presented within the present session.

EXPECTATIONS

– Provide visibility for EO domain among the IT community, including the related challenges and opportunities;
– Find concrete opportunities for common projects.

KEYWORDS
Earth Observation, EO data, image processing.

SESSION ORGANISERS

Florin Serban (Terrasigna) BDVA: TF7/SG5
Anca COSTEA (Terrasigna) BDVA: TF7/SG5

SESSION SPEAKERS / CONTRIBUTORS

• Andreas VEISPAK (Head of Unit for Space Data for Societal Challenges and Growth, European Commission)
• Michele Iapaolo (Technical Support Engineer, European Space Agency (ESA)
• Roberta Mugellesi (European Space Agency – ESA)
• Geoff Sawyer (Secretary General, EARSC)
• Manolis Koubarak (Professor, University of Athens)
• Florin Serban (Managing Director, Terrasigna)

DRAFT AGENDA
– COPERNICUS – EC strategies, initiatives and needs – Andreas VEISPAK, EC, DG GROW
– EO data exploitation – EC, DG R&I – TBC
– ESA Big Data related activities – Michele IAPAOLO, ESA
– EO big data success stories – Roberta MUGELLESI, ESA
– Big Data Europe project – Manolis Koubarak, UOA
– EOMall initiative – Geoff Sawyer, EARSC
– EO Big data – White Paper – TERRASIGNA – BDVA TF7/SG5