Vasile Crăciunescu
Vasile Craciunescu, is a researcher with more than 20 years experience, working for Meteo Romania. 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 the discovery and publishing of free geographic datasets and maps. Since 2011 he is the Romanian delegate in the Copernicus User Forum at the European Commission and the representative of Meteo Romania 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 in the first Romanian ICA-OSGeo Lab. Vasile was the chair of the 2019 FOSS4G international conference.
Sessions
In our allocated 15 minutes, we would like to take you on a trip following the winding roads of building a community, the Romanian geospatial community: geo-spatial.org. We want to share our story, beyond our geodata and knowledge portal, to the very core of the values and principles that have guided us through difficult times and made our overcame challenges even brighter.
In our more than a decade of existence, we’ve organised over 25 national FOSS workshop, a regional FOSS4G in 2013 and a global FOSS4G in 2019, we’ve initiated collaborative geo-related projects and managed to infuse the geospatial component in various non-spatial organisations, such as the ones in education or investigative journalism.
The Copernicus Ground Motion Service (EGMS) is a European Union (EU) initiative under the Copernicus program, which aims to provide near-real-time information about ground deformation caused by natural or man-made hazards. The service uses a variety of data sources, including satellite radar imagery, to monitor and analyze ground motion in areas prone to landslides, sinkholes, earthquakes, and other hazards. Given the sensitive nature of the service, EGMS product validation is a key activity in assuring the user community (especially the decision makers) of the quality of the ground motion and deformation information provided.
The main goals of the EGMS validation system are as follows: to provide a reproducible environment on top of modern cloud infrastructures (with a particular focus on the European geo clouds), to enable the development of scientific tools that validate EGMS characteristics, to facilitate the reproducibility of the validation tasks, and to account for key performance indicators (which will allow shareholders to monitor the quality of the primary EGMS product).
To achieve the first goal of providing a reproducible environment, we have focused on providing Terraform modules that facilitate the deployment of our software stack on any supported cloud platform. The software stack is built on top of the Kubernetes container orchestration system, which runs on top of a managed cloud environment. Kubernetes provides uniform services regardless of the underlying cloud platform.
For the goals of developing the validation tools and the execution of those tools we decided on using an unified approach based on the JupyterHub solution. JupyterHub is used for providing an unified development environment based on R and Python EO software tools (based on modified Pangeo Docker images). Also Jupyter is used for executing the validation tools outside of JupyterHub by leveraging an internal python service that uses papermill to execute the notebook and then “nbconvert” to generate a html webpage containing the required visualizations and documentation in human readable form.
The validation system is complemented by an bespoke web dashboard aimed for providing reports and information related to the status of the various key performance indicators.
Overall the whole validation system was developed by solely using FOSS4G components: GeoPandas, RasterIO, GeoNode, GeoServer and JupyterHub.