openEO

The latest generation of Earth Observation satellites collects large volumes of diverse and thematically rich data with an unprecedented capability. For exploiting these valuable data sets, many research and industry groups have started to shift their processing into the clouds which are at the moment still custom-made and tailored to the specific data infrastructures. This lack of standards not only makes it hard for end users and application developers to develop generic front-ends, but also to compare the cloud offerings by running the same analysis against different cloud back-ends. To solve this, a common interface that allows end- and intermediate users to query cloud-based back offices and carry out computations on them in a simple way is needed.

The openEO project, a three-year Horizon 2020 project funded by the EU, will design such an interface, which will consist of three layers of Application Programming Interfaces, namely a core API for finding, accessing and processing large datasets, a driver APIs to connect to back offices operated by European and worldwide industry, and client APIs for analyzing these datasets using R, Python and JavaScript. To demonstrate the capability of the openEO interface, four use cases based chiefly on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 time series will be implemented.

This project supports the generation of resources for a more efficient exploitation of Earth Observation data. Eurac Research will contribute to the implementation of the driver APIs to connect to back offices operated by European and worldwide industry and will have one of the four case studies dedicated to snow monitoring by an integration of Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 3 images.

Contact person: Alexander Jacob

alexander.jacob@eurac.edu