Initiative

Earth Observation Applications Pilot

The OGC Innovation Program initiative OGC Earth Observation Applications Pilot, conducted between December 2019 and July 2020. The pilot explored an Earth Observation Application software architecture that was developed in OGC Testbeds 13-15. The architecture allows the deployment and execution of externally developed applications on Earth Observation data and processing platforms.

 

The OGC Innovation Program initiative OGC Earth Observation Applications Pilot was conducted between December 2019 and September 2020. The pilot explored an Earth Observation Application software architecture that was developed in OGC Testbeds 13-15. The architecture allows the deployment and execution of externally developed applications on Earth Observation data and processing platforms. The architecture is essentially based on three major components:

  • Execution Management Service (EMS): provides a RESTful interface (defined using OpenAPI) to register applications and build workflows from registered applications. The EMS selects the appropriate ADES platform to execute the processes based on the runtime input parameters (close to the data).
  • Application Deployment and Execution Service (ADES): allows to deploy, discover, and execute applications or to perform quoting requests.
  • Applications are delivered in the form of Docker images along with corresponding metadata called Application Package (AP). The application package provides all information for deployment and execution of an application.

The pilot demonstrated that the interoperability arrangements developed and documented in OGC Innovation Program initiatives Testbed 13-15 provide a solid starting point for maturity tests within operational platforms. Additional arrangements and more detailed definitions have been developed during the pilot that now allow to deploy and execute an application on various platforms with minimal adaptions.

The pilot, sponsored by ESA and Natural Resources Canada, produced very valuable results. It confirmed the general approach to use Docker for application packaging and HTTP Web APIs or Web Services for application handling and execution. It defined application patterns based on data inputs/outputs, confirmed the role of the Common Workflow Language (CWL) for application description, execution, and workflow building; and recommends the usage of the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) as a data manifest for application inputs and outputs.

Through this pilot project, Natural Resources Canada evaluated the Earth observation application software architecture on a version of the Earth Observation Data Management System (EODMS), using data and applications that represent common use-cases for EODMS clients. For this purpose, existing EMS/ADES implementations have been extended to support data stored on Amazon S3 buckets. The evaluation has proven both performance and features of the current architecture.

All results are documented in a series of Engineering Reports. Each report documents the results from the application developer’s perspective (Pixalytics, EU Satellite Centre), the platform provider’s perspective (Spacebel), or both (CRIM, EOX, Terradue) depending on participant’s assignments. 

The following reports have been approved for public release:

The Engineering Reports will be released to the public over the next few weeks. A press release will be published as soon as all reports are available to the public. 

The recording of the Earth Observation Applications-to-the-Data Architecture Webinar, presented live on September 8, 2020, provides a great overview of the key results. 

Further results are available at the OGC Youtube channel.