Edward Boamah
Edward Boamah works as the Technical Manager for Digital Earth Africa, where he supports institutions and countries within Africa to make use of the Analysis Ready Earth Observation data for impact and decision making. My vision is that all Africans, from highly technical professionals to government, policymakers and civil society, will embrace DE Africa. I am most passionate about sharing how EO can be used for managing water, understanding deforestation impacts and informing city planning and urbanisation, but sees EO being used by everyone and anyone because of how easily accessible it will be.
Sessions
Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) is an operational platform with a mission to produce decision-ready products and to harness and increase the capacity of Earth observation users across the African continent. DE Africa’s mission is supported by a platform that involves delivery of data and services hosted in the public cloud. More than three Petabytes of Earth observation (EO) data covering the African continent are routinely updated and made available for free.
This talk will explore how cloud native geospatial technologies, such as the Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF data storage format and Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog metadata standard, enable us to more easily organise, share and analyse these petabytes of data. We’ll discuss how we work with the global EO community to develop standards that enable federation and interoperability. And we’ll demonstrate how DE Africa has been able to to build capacity across Africa, from enabling individuals to run scientific analyses through to assisting national space agencies set up their own platform and supporting industry to deliver innovative products on top of our service.
We will conclude with covering key lessons learnt in building the DE Africa platform, and look to the future, as we transition to African-led operations. The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Digital Earth Australia team, international partners and many individuals who have helped the platform become realised.