DataCube Service for Copernicus

Project Information

DCS4COP

Grant agreement ID: 776342

DOI

10.3030/776342

Project closed

EC signature date 20 October 2017

Start date 1 December 2017

End date 28 February 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies – Space

Total cost

€ 2 266 538,75

EU contribution

€ 1 981 929,88

Coordinated by

BROCKMANN CONSULT GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - DCS4COP (DataCube Service for Copernicus)

Reporting period: 2018-12-01 to 2021-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Data Cube Service for Copernicus (DCS4COP) project established a novel service, integrating Sentinel data, Copernicus Service data, and user supplied data in a Data Cube-based system. The services developed during the project comprise Processing as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), consultancy and training. Target customers of the tailored services are businesses as well as governmental and international organisations and authorities.
Capitalising on the scientific achievements of precursor scientific and methodological developments, specifically on the highly accurate water quality products derived in the FP-7 funded HIGHROC project, a comprehensive operational service for coastal and inland waters named EODataBee has been established and is now offered to customers. The value of satellite Earth Observation data for environmental monitoring has been successfully demonstrated in several applications with potential customers. The combination of access to high quality data, wide selection of thematic Data Layers from satellites and other data sources, state-of-the-art Earth Observation processing and analysis tools, analysis readiness of these data layers in form of data cubes, unrivalled expertise in the coastal domain, and cutting-edge IT solutions at competitive costs has been proven to be highly attractive to users across Europe. In particular, the EODataBee team offers tailored services to optimally meet customers’ requirements by selecting from a portfolio of different services including visualisation, API access, virtual laboratory, direct data access. Finally, the service may be closely integrated into existing business processes to maximise the customer’s benefit and to minimise inefficiencies and inconsistencies.
The EODataBee website at www.eodatabee.eu is the best starting point for potential customers of the service to get a first overview of the service’s capabilities. Website visitors may familiarize themselves with EODataBee’s web viewers, which disseminate the information of operational demonstration services, and learn more about successful EODataBee applications, some of which also offer free web portals to be explored. Developing an individual solution for a specific use case is then done in direct exchange between the customer and the EODataBee team.
EODataBee is attractive to customers because it offers a high-quality turn-key solution for individual use cases at affordable costs, much lower than mastering the learning curve for own developments. It has therefore a large potential to boost the value-adding market and expand its reach to many companies and organisations. The DCS4COP consortium has optimally used the project to establish EODataBee as an attractive service on the market, could already win first paying customers in the market introduction phase of DCS4COP, and is looking forward to further grow EODataBee as a sustainable service in the future. The main objectives of the project, to boost the uptake of Copernicus data, particularly for water applications, and to build a sustainable business around cloud-based services for water monitoring, have thus been fully achieved.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project is organised in three phases of twelve months each, namely the Set-up, Demonstration, and Market Introduction.
The main tasks in in the first twelve months, i.e. the Set-up phase, have been related to preparatory works required for achieving the readiness to operate the planned Data Cube service. The team thus engaged particularly in software development and service implementation to generate the Data Cubes and to offer different services like visualisation or virtual laboratories with the Data Cubes. In addition, the list of input data has been consolidated and prioritised and high priority data sets, e.g. for water quality, have been either generated by the team or acquired from Copernicus services. With the software solution and the data at hand, a first generic use case has been implemented end-to-end, i.e. from gathering input data to providing the service to users.
Tailored trainings and consultancy will complement the information service. To this end, the plan and standards for these service components have been developed in initial versions. Finally, validation plans for the Data Layers as well as the service itself have been created to ensure the high quality of EODataBee.
Besides the technical work, a market analysis has been initiated to better understand the market of coastal and inland water services. In parallel the business model has been refined, also with the interim results of the market analysis. Moreover, the team worked on the branding and the visual identity of the service under development. The EODataBee name and logo (see attached graphics) are the results of this activity.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The DCS4COP project aims at the development of a value-adding water quality service which removes the technical barrier experienced by many intermediate users when dealing with large amounts of complex data.
At the heart of the EODataBee services, the high-resolution water colour products from HIGHROC offer information on the heterogeneous and dynamic coastal, river, and lake environments at highest scientific quality (Ruddick et al., 2016), The water quality information offered through EODataBee has considerable competitive advantages over standard products currently offered by Copernicus and other coastal services in terms of accuracy and resolution, both in time and space, achieved by leveraging the most recent multi-sensor and multi-algorithm developments from HIGHROC.
EODataBee will thus open entirely new, commercial application areas including support for dredging, windfarm construction and operation, aquaculture and feature detection. These regions of interest were previously inaccessible because of the limitations in spatial resolution of MERIS and Sentinel-3 OLCI. The operational potential of these satellite-based water quality products will be maximized in EODataBee through increased accessibility to the ocean colour products integrated with other oceanography data sources (e.g. numerical models and in situ data). This greatly facilitates a holistic understanding of aquatic systems and increases the range of use cases– and thus potential customers – for the service.
Until the end of the project, we therefore expect to attract several paying users of the service with sophisticated use cases requiring the integration of high-quality coastal data from different sources. Many of them wouldn’t have been feasible for technical or economic reasons without EODataBee and therefore considerably extend the applications for Earth Observation in a challenging environment.

EODataBee logo black

EODataBee logo yellow