Abstract
ABSTRACTThe challenge of enabling syntactic and semantic interoperability for comprehensive and reproducible online processing of big Earth observation (EO) data is still unsolved. Supporting both types of interoperability is one of the requirements to efficiently extract valuable information from the large amount of available multi-temporal gridded data sets. The proposed system wraps world models, (semantic interoperability) into OGC Web Processing Services (syntactic interoperability) for semantic online analyses. World models describe spatio-temporal entities and their relationships in a formal way. The proposed system serves as enabler for (1) technical interoperability using a standardised interface to be used by all types of clients and (2) allowing experts from different domains to develop complex analyses together as collaborative effort. Users are connecting the world models online to the data, which are maintained in a centralised storage as 3D spatio-temporal data cubes. It allows also non-experts to extract valuable information from EO data because data management, low-level interactions or specific software issues can be ignored. We discuss the concept of the proposed system, provide a technical implementation example and describe three use cases for extracting changes from EO images and demonstrate the usability also for non-EO, gridded, multi-temporal data sets (CORINE land cover).
Highlights
We propose a scalable, web-based system making use of an Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) (Open Geospatial Consortium) conform Web Processing Service (WPS) for processing Earth observation (EO) data in a client-server environment
The proposed online processing system provides an Application Programming Interface (API) to access the knowledge base and to search for appropriate published world models based on different criteria
Since the world model is stored in the knowledge base, the analysis can be repeated using a different area of interest (AOI) and/or a different duration of interest (DOI)
Summary
Technical progress in Earth observation (EO) with increasing spatial resolutions of sensors and shorter revisiting times entails the big data slogan to ‘bring the user to the data and not the data to the user’ to the EO community. The present paper focuses on this second challenge, to bring the information to those who need it – independently from their location, their soft- and hardware and their technical background This entails a technical challenge as a webbased system allowing a declarative approach to processing big Earth data in full support of both syntactic and semantic interoperability. As defined by the Research Data Alliance (2015) is ‘the ability of services and systems to exchange data in a meaningful/useful way’ It is a more challenging concept because it implies a mutual understanding of the meaning of data and information in the communication process (Harvey et al 1999). Semantic interoperability allows different domainspecific world models to be concatenated to a larger workflow
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