One of the greatest challenges currently facing the earth is climate change: How is the habitat on our planet changing? Which parts of the earth will still have an adequate supply of water in the future? How should we best manage natural resources? – These complex questions cannot be directly predicted thanks to satellite-based geoinformation, but they can at least be better assessed.
How applications of Earth observations can be better used in the future is what we have been addressing in the Earth Observation Cloud Platform Concept Development Study – EO Cloud CDS. In this way, the OGC is tying in with the goals of the global network GEO. The association of governments and organizations aims to improve Earth observation systems and data that promote measures for environmental protection and greater sustainability. With the help of these data, natural disasters such as droughts, floods or forest fires can be better predicted. For the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction access to and usability of geospatial data is also crucial for disaster prevention and risk reduction.
The project provides an architecture for platforms where data can be stored, processed and shared across systems. Application developers can develop and test their applications locally before making these platforms available.
A set of standards is required so that application developers can make their applications available on multiple platforms with minimal customization:
- How is the application described?
- How is the application deployed and executed?
- How must data be made available to the application?
- How can the final results be made available on a permanent basis?
The study focuses on architecture assessment and adaptation/implementation of OGC standards or draft specifications for the following:
- Locating and loading available data
- Discovery and retrieval of existing services using interoperable technologies based on OGC
- Developing and deploying custom services based on OGC standards, including underlying serverless computing environments optimized for the cloud such as AWS Lambda with applications packaged in Docker containers
- Leveraging external data from a variety of sources
- Delivering results through various standardized interfaces and APIs
- Advertising new processes, discovery to consumers through catalog technology
- Controlled access across platforms, andÂ
- Identity management