OGC Requests Information on Earth Observation Big Data Architecture

11 April 2019: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), in collaboration with The European Space Agency (ESA), is seeking industry feedback on its draft Earth Observation Big Data Architecture and a planned Earth Observation Big Data Analytics Market Enablement Initiative coming up later this year.

Over the last two years, as an outcome of OGC’s Testbed-13 and Testbed-14 Interoperability Initiatives, OGC, in collaboration with ESA and other OGC member sponsors, developed a software architecture that allows deploying and executing applications close to the physical location of big data, such as Earth Observation data (e.g. remote sensed images), model outputs (e.g. climate forecasts), and other in situ data. The architecture features a set of emerging specifications that will standardize the full data-analysis life cycle.

The cloud-hosted data-analysis life cycle includes: application development and description; containerization; registration at app stores; discovery and on-request deployment in cloud environments; parameterized execution and final result access. This life cycle occurs in harmony with business functions such as quoting and billing.

Developed in a rapid prototyping research environment, the software architecture is now ready for real world testing and exploitation. OGC, together with its sponsoring organizations ESA and Telespazio Vega, is therefore organizing a major maturity evaluation Pilot that is open to the whole geospatial community. OGC invites other organizations to sponsor the pilot.

For this reason, organizations are invited to provide feedback on the current architecture, and express their interest in joining the new pilot scheduled tentatively for the second half of 2019. Links to conference publications and Engineering Reports that describe the details of the architecture are available in the RFI.

Organizations are additionally invited to describe their possible contributions, data sets, service offerings, platforms, standards, and architectures to allow the pilot organizers to include all aspects early in the planning phase. The pilot plans to provide cost-share opportunities to participants.

The Earth Observation Big Data Architecture Request For Information document is available online or for download as a PDF from the OGC Portal. Information on how to submit a response is contained within the RFI. Responses are requested by April 28, 2019.