FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

LOOSE: Combining loosely coupled components into coherent architecture
2022-08-25, 11:30–12:00 (Europe/Rome), General online

The continuously increasing amount of long-term and of historic data in EO facilities in the form of online datasets and archives makes it necessary to address technologies for the longterm management of these data sets, including their consolidation, preservation, and continuation across multiple missions. The management of long EO data time series of continuing or historic missions, with more than 20 years of data available already today, requires technical solutions and technologies which differ considerably from the ones exploited by existing systems.

The ESA project LOOSE (Technologies for the Management of LOng EO Data Time Series) enables investigating, testing and implementing new technologies to support long time series processing.

For specific tasks (such as ingestion, discovery, access, processing, analysis of EO data) a multitude of completely different mature open source components is usually available. LOOSE aims at combining functionally similar solutions from different heritages into one comprehensive framework. LOOSE even supports parallelism in a way that multiple solutions for the identical task are available and the application developer is invited to chose between these different components during implementation (e. g. "GeoServer" versus "EOXServer").

In addition, LOOSE partners extended well-known existing components with new capabilities (=interfaces) to support efficient ingestion, discovery, exploitation optimized access, processing and optimized analysis of EO data timeseries. For example, GeoServer was extended with the capability to handle STAC metadata.

Overall outcome of the project is a "blueprint architecture concept" which focuses on the interfaces between components and takes innovative concepts such as Bulk data retrieval from dedicated archives, OGC's Data Analysis Processing API and Data Cubes offering Discrete Global Grid Systems into consideration (see enclosed viewgraph).

The LOOSE system architecture is inspired by the EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture (EOEPCA) and focuses on the technological evolution of selected services that enable the end-to-end workflow from retrieving long-term archived EO products to the extraction of high-level information based on processed value-added datasets. Architecture and interoperability are evaluated within LOOSE by using different implementations of these services (e.g. EOxServer and GeoServer) and deploying the whole system on two different infrastructures (DLR/LRZ and Mundi/OTC). The complete LOOSE infrastructure is built on Kubernetes and is therefore well transferrable between different cloud providers.

The validity of the LOOSE blueprint architecture is demonstrated in three different real-world application pilots.
These applications are covering totally different thematic areas:
- Agricultural monitoring (based on Sentinel-1 and -2 data),
- monitoring urbanization globally (also based on Sentinel-1 and -2) and
- supporting fishery in the Black Sea (multi sensor approach, including in situ-data).

LOOSE partners are DLR (Oberpfaffenhofen), EOX (Vienna), Terrasigna (Bucharest) and Mundialis (Bonn).

Vasile Craciunescu is a researcher with more than 20 years experience, working for the MeteoRomania and Terrasigna, being in charge with the scientific and operational activities related to rapid mapping, spatial data infrastructure and webmapping. He received his diploma in cartography and physical geography in 2001. He has a good experience in working and leading national, EU and ESA research projects. In 2006 Vasile started geo-spatial.org, a collaborative effort by and for the Romanian community to facilitate the sharing of geospatial knowledge and data. Since 2011 he is the Romanian delegate in the Copernicus User Forum at the European Commission and the representative of MeteoRomania at OGC. In august 2014 he was elected to the OSGeo board of directors. For the last eight years he has been teaching FOSS4G-based techniques at the Faculty of Geography-University of Bucharest. Vasile was the chair of the FOSS4G2019 international conference.

Physicist, diploma and PhD in Atmosphere Physics and Chemistry.

Since 2004 at German Aerospace Center - DLR.

Worked in the continuous monitoring of stratospheric ozone, tropospheric air chemistry, air pollution and health-related issues. Came into information technology with focus on data publication and operational processing of EO data products.

In addition: Co-founder of ajuma GmbH, Germany:
Developed, produce and market the UV-Bodyguard, a wearable which measures the solar UV-intensity and warns the user adhead of time before the sunburn.