Erwin Goor
Project Manager
Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO)
Belgium

Biography
Erwin Goor is project manager at the Remote Sensing department at VITO with a focus on Data Distribution & Exploitation. He's responsible for the distribution platform for the ESA Earth Observation mission PROBA-V, as well as for the Copernicus Global Land Service. Recent R&D activities focus on data exploitation platforms and on-demand processing of large amounts of data on scalable platforms.

Abstract
An Improved Infrastructure for the Exploitation of EO-Data Sources at VITO

Co-Authors:
Dirk Daems, VITO
Jeroen Dries, VITO

The presentation will provide an overview of the architecture and design of the PADUA infrastructure at VITO, which is currently developed and gradually deployed. PADUA (Product Archiving, Distribution and User oriented Access) is an end-to-end solution to drastically improve the exploitation of the data from the Earth Observation missions SPOT-VEGETATION and PROBA-V by both researchers and end-users. In addition the derived bio-geophysical products from the Copernicus Global Land service will be integrated in this solution. Next to these time series and near real-time data at medium spatial resolution, EO-data at higher spatial resolution, e.g. Landsat and Sentinel-2, are integrated as well. Fast analysis of time series covering +15 years of data is addressed, as well as the on-demand processing of near real-time data. The solution can be an example to be applied for exploitation platforms using Sentinel data in the future in support of the land/vegetation community. To address the needs of application developers, a cloud-based 'research' platform is offered with tools and components to access, analyse and pre-process available data. Hadoop, as a software framework for data-intensive distributed applications, is applied in this context for the on-demand processing of EO-data. Array database technology, OLAP data cubes and Spark are used for the fast analysis of the large time series. A solution to design information dashboards which can be customised by the users to their specific needs, is built using several open-source Javascript libraries. Cloud computing technology is applied to provide a performing and scalable solution. The system is deployed both on private and public cloud resources, the latter today only as a demonstrator. The presentation will give an overview of the different technologies which are applied and explain the potential of this approach within a European federation of platforms to address e.g. the challenges in big data handling related to the EC Copernicus programme.