Ingo Simonis's blog

The OGC Data Access and Processing API (DAPA) - backed by example code for both server & client side software, scripts for cloud deployment & installation, and best practice guides - is a so-called “convenience API” that allows scientists and other geospatial analysts to run several operations on Earth Observation or other data using a single API call, in turn providing the data in a form directly ready for further analysis. 

As such, it takes most of the processing burden away from the user, greatly simplifying Earth Observation data processing and analysis workflows, while also enhancing the reproducibility of scientific analyses.

In late April 2021, OGC and GEO ran the 'Towards Data Cube Interoperability' workshop, which invited data cube experts from across the globe. Results from the workshop underscored the need for a ‘user centric’ API-based approach to accessing data cubes that exposes not only the data available to the user, but also the processing algorithms that can be run on it - and allow the user to add their own.

With the recent release of the Workshop Report, this blog post serves to provide an overview of some of the outcomes from the day, as well as provide a look towards OGC's path to data cube interoperability.

In almost all cases, location data is involved. For decades, OGC has driven toward open solutions for location data integration from heterogeneous sources that are diverse in their purposes, business rules, underlying concepts, and enabling technologies. With this vast experience, OGC has evolved into a collective problem-solving community, and is uniquely positioned to address location data integration challenges at all scales.

The OGC Engineering Report OGC 19-003: Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) Compute Challenge has now been published using the information gained from the Earth System Grid Federation extension to OGC Testbed-14, which successfully concluded in June, 2019. 

The T-14 ESGF extension demonstrated impressively how the ‘applications to the data’ architecture, developed in Testbed-13 and Testbed-14, is applicable to climate simulation data processing and analysis. The architecture builds on Web Processing Service profiles and metadata models to allow application developers to make their applications available to the community via Docker containers.

Discovery is an art, at least if the desired object is more complex than a simple blog web-page such as this one. Here we are talking about discovery of Earth Observation (EO) products, services providing on-demand processing capabilities, and applications that are not deployed yet but waiting in an application store for their ad-hoc deployment and execution. 

Instead of processing ever-increasing amounts of data locally, these applications are transferred to where the data resides. But how to discover these applications? How to understand what data an application can be applied to? How to chain applications? How to combine applications with already deployed services that provide data and data processing capabilities? All these aspects are now in focus of OGC Testbed-15.

Testbed-14, the biggest Innovation Program initiative executed by OGC in 2018, came to an end last week at ESA/ESRIN in Frascati, Italy with a final demonstration. 

As part of its Innovation Program, OGC invited international experts to two sessions at this year’s International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) in sunny, hot Valencia, Spain, the week of July 23rd. 

On 10-12 April, OGC kicked-off Testbed-14 at USGS' headquarters in Reston, VA. The Lead Architect, Ingo Simonis, discusses on what to expect from OGC's "most complex testbed ever."