[OSGeo-Announce] EarthServer Project goes into the second round

[Jorge Sanz]

The EarthServer initiative is establishing Agile Analytics on Petabyte
data cubes as a commodity.

Pushing the boundaries of Big Earth Data services, the
intercontinental Earthserver initiative enables researchers to browse,
access, and analyze massive multi-dimensional data sets from a wide
range of sources. Big Earth Data at your fingertips - this is the
vision of EarthServer for unleashing the potential of Big Data through
a disruptive paradigm shift in technology:

* from isolat-ed silos of data with disparate functionality towards a
single, uniform information space;
* from a difficult, artificial differentiation between data and
metadata access to unified retrieval;
* from zillions of files towards few whatever-size datacubes;
* from limited functionality to the freedom of asking anything,
anytime, any server in a peer network of data centers worldwide.

In phase 1, EarthServer has established open ad-hoc analytics on
massive Earth Science data, based on and extending the leading Array
Database technology, rasdaman. According to EU Commission and inde
pendent reviewers, rasdaman will "significantly transform the way that
scientists in different areas of Earth Science will be able to access
and use data in a way that hitherto was not possible" as demonstrated
by portals with over 230 TB of spatio-temporal data. EarthServer "with
no doubt has been shaping the Big Earth Data landscape through the
standardization activities within OGC, ISO and beyond".

Now phase 2 of EarthServer has started, with an even more ambitious
goal: data centers will provide at least 1 Petabyte of 3-D and 4-D
datacubes. Technology advance will allow real-time scaling of such
Petabyte cubes, and intercontinental fusion. This power of data
handling will be wrapped into direct visual interaction based on
multi-dimensional visualization techniques, in particular: NASA World
Wind. Following the motto "a cube says more than a million images"
EarthServer has set out to redefine the Big Data service landscape
even more.

This way, critical support will be given to Copernicus and the
Sentinel satellite data: a single 3D x/y/t datacube will be
constructed for each satellite instrument so that millions of images
form a single, simple data space, irrespective of its size resulting.
Likewise, each climate dataset will form a single 4D datacube. Access
to these cubes is through a clean-slate standards-based query language
on n-D grids, OGC WCPS. This yields the agility that any query can be
sent at any time, without admin intervention on server side. Multiple
cubes can be combined based on parallel, distributed processing.
Altogether, the WCPS language allows navigation, extraction,
aggregation, and fusion of any-size space/time data cubes using
simple, yet powerful query operators.

The consortium consists of Jacobs University (Germany, coordinator),
rasdaman GmbH (Germany, SME), , Plymouth Marine Laboratory (UK),
European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (UK), MEEO s.r.l.
(Italy, SME), and CITE S.A. (Greece, SME). Additionally, two
high-profile international organizations participate: NASA (US) and
National Computational Infrastructure (Australia).

Read more: www.earthserver.eu

-- 
Heike Hoenig