Participants also had the chance of interacting with a live full demonstration of the PublicaMundi software, starting from publishing data under various metadata schemes (such as INSPIRE and ISO), and continuing into complex mapping visualizations and on-the fly processing of ingested data. Valuable discussions have arisen from the presentations and feedback for future improvements was collected.

The majority of the audience consisted of researchers in Geo and Planetary Sciences that were able to validate the strong capabilities of the platform in terms of publishing and managing their datasets. The presentation started with a general introduction to the goals of the PublicaMundi project: publish, share and reuse open geodata. It continued with a description of the underlying software and architecture that power the platform in order to achieve these goals: CKAN, pycsw, ZOO-Project, rasdaman, geoserver etc. Next, individual features of the platforms have been presented and demonstrated, with emphasis on the Mapping and Data APIs. The final part of the presentation was dedicated to showcasing the OGC services offered through the PublicaMundi platform and their importance in interoperability and common infrastructure development.

At the 2014 edition, the first to be held worldwide, the international Earth observation community awarded prizes worth a total of EUR 300,000 in nine categories during a festive ceremony held at the Berlin headquarters of Deutsche Telekom.

The application ideas submitted to the Copernicus Masters 2014 offer a glimpse into the next generation of Earth observations services in a wide array of business and societal sectors, including health, infrastructure, disaster management, agriculture and forestry, and environmental protection.

The rasdaman technology, which enables the storage and processing of multi-dimensional arrays (“raster data”) of unlimited size in a conventional database, was one of 170 submissions from 43 countries.

Prof. Baumann comments: “It is a great honor for our rasdaman technology to be recognized on such global scale”. Rasdaman is already in use by international satellite and climate data centers on hundreds of Terabytes, where it offers analyses of snow and ice cover, atmospheric and oceanography data, geophysical information, as well as satellite data about Mars.”

“This scalable array engine enables fast and user-friendly big data analysis that is optimised for geo-information from satellites and other sources”, says Dr Jurry de la Mar, Account Director Global Accounts & International Business at T-Systems International GmbH. “Among other industries, it is designed for oil and gas and insurance. While the engine significantly reduces the volume of data transferred and processed in complex queries, such queries can also easily be managed thanks to their basis on international standards.”

In his opening speech at the competition’s awards ceremony, ESA’s Earth Observation director Prof. Dr. Volker Liebig said: “The Copernicus Masters is an outstanding platform for promoting user uptake and raising awareness of the benefits of the Copernicus data and information,” declared. “I am pleased about the high quality exhibited by this year’s ideas which reflect the potential Earth observation data and global environmental information present in countless new areas of application.”

This year’s Copernicus Masters awards ceremony was accompanied by the Satellite Masters Conference for the first time, which gave the winners the chance to present their ideas to the global Earth observation and navigation industry and share innovations in aerospace technologies and services.

For the complete winner description see: Copernicus Masters 2014 Winners

More info on the conference: www.satellite-masters-conference.eu

More info on the rasdaman technology: www.rasdaman.org

Jeffrey K. Harris, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said: “We wish to express our deep appreciation for the extraordinary contribution you have made to the OGC community and to people around the world who are the ultimate beneficiaries of improvements in the development, management and use of geoscientific data. Devoting your time and bringing your dedication, expertise, critical thinking and leadership to OGC working groups has resulted in significant and enduring advances in technical standards.”

Peter Baumann has been closely working with the Open Geospatial Consortium for more than ten years. He is editor of twelve adopted standards around the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite of Big Geo Data standards. Recently he has been instrumental in establishing a new Big Data Domain Working Group with the OGC which he also co-chairs. As a consequence of this engagement, Peter Baumann has been invited by the European Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative, INSPIRE, as well as ISO to provide expertise in geo service and query language standardization.

Peter Baumann’s research focuses on large-scale scientific information services, in particular: massive multi-dimensional data cubes. He has architected the rasdaman (“raster data manager”) technology which in fact has pioneered a new research field, Array Databases. With rasdaman, spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data of any size can be accessed and explored interactively through Array SQL which offers a “what you get is what you need” interface to scientists, engineers, and other data users.

About the Kenneth D. Gardels Award The Award is named after Kenneth D. Gardels, a Research Specialist at the Center for Environmental Design Research (University of California), who passed away in 1999 at the height of his career. It was conceived to memorialize the spirit of a man with a passion for making the world a better place through open communication and the use of geospatial information technology to improve the quality of human life.

About OGC The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 473 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. More info: www.opengeospatial.org

SQL has been tremendously successful in running any-size databases in business and administration. However, the “Big Data” in science are structured differently. Instead of simple tables, they often consist of multi-dimensional “data cubes”. In Geo sciences, for example, this encompasses 1-dimensional sensor data, 2-D satellite imagery, 3-D x/y/t image timeseries as well as x/y/z geophysical voxel data, and 4-D x/y/z/t weather data. In Life sciences, there is laserscan microscopy and brain scans. And it can grow as large as simulations of the whole universe when it comes to astrophysics.

But SQL is not able to find, filter, and process such arrays, and consequently today arrays largely are maintained outside databases. Recognizing this shortcoming, Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University Bremen, and his group have long been researching on ways to extend SQL appropriately. The rasdaman system which the group has established effectively has coined a new technology, Array Databases. In a recent technology demonstration, more than 1,000 computers have collaborated in a cloud to jointly compute the result of one single database query. This “distributed query processing” means a massive speedup, and research challenges on multi-Petabyte data cubes can be answered that hitherto were unsolvable.

Meantime, international data centers use this tool to allow scientists gain unanticipated insights into their spatio-temporal data cubes, and rasdaman installations can be found at NASA, ESA, British Geological Survey, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Deutscher Wetterdienst, and many more.

In Beijing all national bodies participating in the SQL working group of ISO unanimously have agreed on the importance of arrays in SQL. Following thorough assessment of all options available, the group has accepted the proposal of Baumann for further elaboration. The new standard will be named ISO 9075 SQL/MDA, for “Multi-Dimensional Arrays”.

On the 16th of January the European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed selection of a Big Data engine, developed at Jacobs University Bremen in collaboration with a small hi-tech company, to go on board of a satellite. Goal is to demonstrate how satellites can process data on board and participate in planet-wide analytics networks.

Satellite imagery is indispensable for rapid response to disasters such as floods and wildfires, but also for everyday’s governmental tasks, like land use monitoring: who is farming what and how much? However, data from a satellite take a long journey: when the satellite is flying over a ground station, it attempts to download as much of the imagery taken as possible. That is passed on to some data center which undertakes a lot of processing, puts the resulting products into its archive, and eventually publishes them. Not always is it easy for users to find the needle, that is: those data they are interested in, from the resulting haystack of data.

Researchers at Jacobs University want to change this now, allowing regular users to get data directly from the source. To this end, this image source, the satellite, will be instrumented to allow flexible processing and filtering of data on board. This is accomplished by the rasdaman system (“raster data manager”), an innovative analytics engine specialized on science and engineering data which is already in operation internationally, among others at NASA Ames and ESA. This effort is not just a one-time endeavour: insights gained can help to save substantial amounts of electrical energy in computers on the planet in future.

In ESA’s OPS-SAT project, a so-called CubeSat will be launched into an earth orbit. A CubeSat is a small, low-cost satellite which can be quickly and flexibly assembled for different configurations and tasks. CubeSats have been invented by US universities to overcome the high costs and time it takes to launch satellites, effectively hindering them from doing space research. While traditional remote sensing satellites cost hundreds of millions of Euros and have development times of a decade and more, CubeSats can be flexibly adapted to new experiments and launched with moderate costs. Today, the final specification of the satellite has been released for review by the Jacobs software engineers. Launch of OPS-SAT is foreseen for early 2016.

The OPS-SAT model hosts a Linux PC, camera, and GPS so that images and their position on earth can be recorded, processed, and transmitted to earth. Accessing the satellite will be done through open standards well known by geo service providers on Earth, so that no special programs are needed; any regular Web browser is sufficient. Therefore, the researchers see this as a contribution towards democratizing data access: on principle will allow anybody to access such a service via Internet – neither expensive receiving stations, nor huge data centers will be needed.