2nd GEOSS Science and Technology Stakeholder Workshop GEOSS: Supporting Science for the Millennium Development Goals and Beyond Bonn, Germany, August 28—31, 2012

The EarthServer initiative: towards Agile Big Data Services

Peter Baumann
Jacobs University Bremen, Germany

The European eInfrastructure initiative EarthServer, aims at establishing Big Earth Data Analytics based exclusively on open standards. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) standard interfaces provide basic access, while the OGC Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) offers a flexible query language for multi-dimensional raster data. Merging WCPS with XQuery achieves integrated data and metadata retrieval. The rasdaman ("raster data manager") Array DBMS, acting as technology platform, is extended with transparent distributed query processing on pre-existing archives. 3D web clients hide the queries and offer visual analytics on nD coverage data.

Six Lighthouse services together cover Earth and Planetary sciences; each of them will provide 100+ TB of their existing archives through OGC WCS and WCPS interfaces.

EarthServer directly supports core GEOSS goals:

• development, use, and dissemination of open OGC coverage standards boosts coordination and integration of Earth observing systems;
• flexible ad-hoc filtering and processing of heterogeneous coverage archives promotes data access and use for informed decision making;
• agile service design fosters versatile recombination of data assets for use across Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs);
• by unleashing analytics capabilities to users with little or no programming experience, EarthServer contributes to bridging social gaps.

In this talk, we present the EarthServer Lighthouse Applications and outline the underlying technology and standards.

More information on EarthServer is available on www.earthserver.eu.

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