Abstract
Abstract. Remote sensing considerably benefits from the fusion of open data from different sources, including far-range sensors mounted on satellites and short-range sensors on drones or Internet of Things devices. Open data is an emerging philosophy attracting an increasing number of data owners willing to share. However, most of the data owners are unknown and thus, untrustable, which makes shared data likely unreliable and possibly compromising associated outcomes. Currently, there exist tools that distribute open data, acting as intermediaries connecting data owners and users. However, these tools are managed by central authorities that set rules for data ownership, access, and integrity, limiting data owners and users. Therefore, a need emerges for a decentralized system to share and retrieve data without intermediaries limiting participants. Here, we propose a blockchain-based system to share and retrieve data without the need for a central authority. The proposed architecture (i) allows sharing data, (ii) maintains the data history (origin and updates), and (iii) allows retrieving and evaluating the data adding trustworthiness. To this end, the blockchain network enables the direct connection of data owners and users. Furthermore, blockchain automatically interacts with participants and keeps a transparent record of their actions. Hence, blockchain provides a decentralized database that enables trust among the participants without a central authority. We analyzed the potentials and critical issues of the architecture in a remote sensing use case of precision farming. The analysis shows that participants benefit from the properties of the blockchain in providing trusted data for remote sensing applications.
Highlights
Space agency policies on open data access encourage the development of various automatic methods to extract useful information for a wide range of Earth and Planetary science and applications
This paper proposes an architecture based on the blockchain to build a network to share and validate data acquired by untrusted sources
Some examples of common actors are– the company sharing data acquired by IoT sensors on the temperature and the humidity of a crop field; the research group sharing a database on multitemporal images acquired by optical and SAR sensors; and the people that shares pictures taken by a drone or a cellphone
Summary
Space agency policies on open data access encourage the development of various automatic methods to extract useful information for a wide range of Earth and Planetary science and applications. Even if close and far range sensors acquire data on the same scene, they focus on different properties. These two types of data are complementary, and remote sensing (RS) can take advantage of close-range data and integrate them to generate more consistent, accurate, and useful products. Close-range data as IoT measurements have a higher spatial and temporal resolution than ESA’s Sentinel-2, but limited coverage. Intermediaries define the policies for data ownership and access and set the rules to evaluate data reliability and integrity. These tools tend to favor usability over transparency since they aim at connecting data owners with users. We consider precision agriculture as it is well known for combining different types of data, e.g., IoT measurements and satellite optical images, to monitor the status of crop fields
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