11-21, 10:00–10:25 (Pacific/Auckland), WG802
ROCS is building Romania’s Earth Observation infrastructure using FOSS4G tools like STAC, COG, Zarr, MinIO and Kubernetes. The platform enables scalable, cloud-native data access, processing and analytics. Real-world use cases include crop monitoring, forest compliance, EO education, all developed in an open and reusable manner.
The ROCS project represents a national effort to build a scalable, cloud-native infrastructure for EO data management and analysis in Romania, fully based on FOSS4G tools. The presentation will cover the project’s architectural design, technical stack (including STAC, COG, Zarr, OGC APIs and Kubernetes) and implementation of federated data centers that ensure efficient, distributed EO processing.
A key focus is on real-world applications, including automated crop monitoring, forestry compliance (e.g., EUDR), and the integration of EO tools in education. ROCS is committed to open development, reproducibility and interoperability, aiming to contribute back to the FOSS4G community. The session will be valuable for developers, platform builders and public sector stakeholders interested in building sustainable, cloud-ready EO platforms with open-source technologies.
The talk will also reflect on practical challenges encountered, including the growing concern over license volatility in widely used open-source projects and how this affects long-term sustainability.
Vasile Craciunescu is a researcher with more than 24 years experience, working for the Romanian National Meteorological Administration and Terrasigna, being in charge with the scientific and operational activities related to GIS database design and implementation, deployment of standardized web services, spatial enabled web interfaces, ETL, EO data processing, project management. 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 (http://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 technical representative of Meteo Romania at Open Geospatial Consortium. In August 2014 he was elected to the Open Source Geospatial Foundation board of directors. For the last 14 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. From February 2021 he is the Romanian delegate in the Destination Earth Coordination Group and recently was appointed as national expert in the EEA EIONET Copernicus Technical Group.
Marian Neagul is currently a Post Doctoral Researcher at the Institute eAustria Timisoara. Marian graduated with a B.A. degree in Computer Science from West University of Timisoara (UVT). He obtained his M.S. from UVT in 2011 and a Ph.D. also from UVT in 2015.
Marian’s general research topics cover machine learning, distributed systems, computer networks and operating systems. Lately he has focused on Machine Learning applied to Earth Observation applications, Earth Observation platforms and Cloud Computing, particularly orchestration, deployment and configuration management.
Marian was involved in several research projects ranging from areas like GRID Computing, Cloud Computing up to Digital Preservation. Some of the notable research projects include the FP7 mOSAIC Project (building an PaaS and API for cloud applications), FP7 MODAClouds (focusing on model driven development of cloud applications), H2020 CloudLightning (targeting the research of self organising clouds), H2020 Harmonia and AI4Europe. As part of his work in the afore mentioned projects Marian coauthored more then a dozen research papers in the areas of interest of the projects.
Marian is also involved in standardisation activities with ESA and OGC, particularly in the area of exploitation platforms and EO processing specifications.
