openEO Platform

The openEO Platform project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA) builds upon the EO cloud processing platforms managed by VITO, Sinergise, EODC and Eurac, and the platform management as well as software development experience of these partners. The project has the ambitious goal to create a federated open infrastructure for processing of earth observation data not dissimilar to the scope of the Google Earth engine but in an open source environment. The openEO API’s original goal of mitigating the current heterogeneity in interfaces of cloud-based EO processing back-ends matches the ESA requirement of realizing a federated infrastructure and the current situation that no single processing back-end serves (or will any time soon serve) all datasets of interest. openEO Platform will serve different user groups by providing clients and interfaces tailored to their needs: remote sensing researchers can make use of a front-end where JupyterLab is being proposed as its main data science front-end. R users can make use of the openEO R client and develop workflows in RStudio using R-Markdown. Users accustomed to building workflows interactively can use the openEO web client for graphically creating workflows, exploring results, and managing jobs. Software developers can work in their own programming IDE to integrate services into larger or dedicated applications. All interfaces share the openEO client-side libraries to minimize complexity. These libraries are already available for Python, R and JavaScript, and significantly reduce the learning curve for using these services. For well-known services such as viewing, OGC services are exposed to ensure interoperability with other, existing tools. The successful open development model adopted by openEO will be continued while developing openEO Platform, in order to make it an inclusive community project.

Eurac Research is responsible for the organization of the implementation of the pilot use cases building on the existing experience of earth observation and their strong involvement in the original H2020 project. Eurac will implement three of the nine use cases covering 1) the pre-processing of EO data to Analysis Ready data, 2) converting their existing processing chain for change detection into an openEO workflow and apply it to larger areas and 3) finally developing a new state of the art forest canopy mapping workflow built on the integration of very high resolution commercial satellite data and freely available Copernicus data.

Contact person: Alexander Jacob alexander.jacob@eurac.edu