OGC Publishes Best Practice for Earth Observation Application Packages

The new OGC Best Practice is a guide for developers that wish to package and deploy Earth Observation (EO) Applications for a selected Exploitation Platform.

An EO Exploitation Platform is a collaborative virtual work environment that provides, through one coherent set of standard interfaces, the mechanisms to deliver applications and access the EO data, and the ICT resources required to work with them. For an overview of the concept, and OGC’s contributions to it, see the article published in GeoConnexion Magazine entitled An app store for Big Data by OGC’s Chief Technology Innovation Officer, Dr. Ingo Simonis.

The newly published Best Practice Document serves as a guide for the implementation, packaging, and deployment of EO Applications. It supports developers that want to adapt and package their existing algorithms written in a specific language for deployment in ready-made Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms and have the applications exposed through an interface that conforms to the OGC API - Processes Standard.

“OGC has released the Best Practice for Earth Observation Application Package as a guide for application developers to ensure portability of their EO Application Packages across different cloud infrastructures,” said Günther Landgraf, Head of Digital Platforms at the European Space Agency (ESA) and co-author of the document. “A first open source implementation of the interoperability middleware that allows execution of such compliant applications is available from EOEPCA, and is going to be available as an industrially operated platform service on the most significant cloud environments hosting EO data.”