eodataservice.org: Big Data platform to enable multi-disciplinary intelligent planet applications via informatics

摘要

We are currently living in a digital geospatial data world: everything is digitalized from the route we take to move, to the way we connect to the internet, weather information and so on. In this "digitalization of the living environment" artificial satellites have played a crucial role, and will play more in future: positioning, telecommunication, Earth observation -based services are directly or indirectly involved in all steps of our daily life. Talking about environmental monitoring, a revolution has happened in the last 20 years, moving from a limited number of observations (stations) and physical-based numerical models, to a massive data collection and supercomputing modeling with hybrid physical and statistical (machine learning) approaches. The various data sources, as well as simulated scenarios, feature, in most of the cases, different data formats, geographic and temporal representations, and this makes their simultaneous and combined exploitation difficult: enabling technologies are emerging to overcome the data access and combination issues. In this respect, the role of standardization is fundamental in both data representation and interfaces. The final scope is to make the data access steps "invisible" for the user, making the transition between data collections seamless, and allowing focusing on data visualization and analysis. This paper describes a multi-disciplinary geospatial data management platform that implements the full data lifecycle, allowing enhanced user experiences in both easiness of usage and completeness of the available functions.