Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms (EPs) is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA), aiming to create various ecosystems of interconnected platforms, based on thematic and/or regional approaches.
The initiative is a set of research and development activities, deployed as collaborative, virtual work environments that access EO data and tools, information and communication technologies resources, through coherent interfaces.
The Exploitation Platforms concept is to move the user close to the data and tools.
Users access a platform work environment providing the data, tools, and resources required, as opposed to downloading, replicating, and exploiting data ‘at home’.
The existing Copernicus Sentinel missions, along with the future similar ones, will deliver an unprecedented amount of data - Sentinel-1 constellation alone generates 10TB of data daily. While the availability of this growing volume of environmental data represents a unique opportunity for science and applications, it also poses a major challenge to achieve its full potential in terms of data exploitation.
Both thematic and regional Exploitation Platforms address these technical challenges related to the huge amounts of Earth Observation data. Their virtual workspaces provide the users community with access to:
- Large volumes of both EO and non-space data;
- Processing software and services;
- Algorithm development and integration environment;
- Computing resources and hosted processing (cloud computing);
- Collaboration/networking opportunities.
TERRASIGNA’s capabilities are actively involved and contribute to the development of these exploitation platforms.