Environmental information is of crucial importance. It helps to understand how our planet and its climate are changing, the role played by human activities in these changes and how these will influence our daily lives. The recent advances of technology in the Earth Observation Industry have proven crucial for new and existing value-adding companies, to explore new opportunities that satellite data offers in several industry sectors ranging from: governmental security, oil & gas, infrastructure, transport, communications, agriculture, energy & natural resources and commercial services (insurance, news, travel, etc.), amongst others.
To support the decisions on environmental policies, and to provide organizations and individuals with updated and reliable information regarding the Earth, the European Commission has created the European Earth Observation programme renamed Copernicus, previously known as GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security). Copernicus, with an estimated cost over €8 billion, is a compound of several satellites (sentinel satellites and others) with different instrumentation, together with ground-based and airborne sensors, that provide observation information of the earth as Open Data, without any cost. Copernicus is intended to provide data for further uptake and use, and research has been conducted by Euroconsult predicting that this programme will have a €1,8Bn turnover impact on Earth Observation value-adding companies and is expected to create approximately 16,000 direct and 51,200 indirect jobs by 2030.
The Maritime Copernicus Enablement Platform (MCEP) solution was developed with the goal of providing a non-complex and reliable Enablement Platform based on Copernicus data, allowing users to easily develop applications for the Maritime sector.
Scale-up beyond current prototype, in order to finalise the platform from the back and front-end side for market readiness, adding two demonstration downstream applications named eSafety and EDIA to undertake an intensive pilot test of the systems supporting burden load of users and to assess the security of the system will be the key factors for the company Eixo Digital to lead its growth and expansion based on this ground-breaking solution that is facing rising demand levels.