2026-09-03 –, Conference Management Room5
The Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem gives every user free access to Europe's Earth observation archive — petabytes of satellite imagery, derived products, and land monitoring datasets, all through cloud-native APIs. We showcase how sovereign EU infrastructure and open standards turn this archive into a foundation for geospatial AI.
Europe has quietly built a comprehensive open geospatial data platform. The Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE), operated by a European consortium (T-Systems, CloudFerro, Sinergise, VITO, DLR, ACRI-st, RHEA Group) under ESA guidance, provides free access to all Sentinel satellite archives, Copernicus Contributing Missions, and an extensive portfolio of derived products — land cover, soil moisture, snow properties, water quality, surface temperature, and more. Most of these datasets are global, not just European — systematic observations covering every continent, across over 100 collections.
This is not just a data catalogue. CDSE is a cloud-native processing platform — through standardized APIs (Sentinel Hub, openEO, STAC, OGC), users get analysis-ready results directly from the API or browser, with custom algorithms called evalscripts running server-side on the full archive. The infrastructure runs on European soil, operated by European companies — a concrete example of data sovereignty that goes beyond policy documents.
In the context of sovereign AI, authoritative geospatial data is a strategic asset. Nations investing in AI capabilities need not just compute infrastructure but trusted, authoritative data distributed through open, standardized APIs. CDSE delivers exactly this: the foundation layer for building geospatial AI applications on open, sovereign infrastructure.
The talk covers:
- CDSE architecture and the European consortium operating it
- The free access tier: what's available and where the boundaries are
- API-first design: why cloud-native processing changes everything
- The sovereign AI angle: authoritative data as national infrastructure
- Practical example: AI-assisted satellite data analysis showcase
Whether you're a researcher, developer, or organization building geospatial applications, CDSE provides the open platform to do it on — backed by the full weight of the EU's Copernicus programme.
Copernicus Browser: https://browser.dataspace.copernicus.eu
Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem: https://dataspace.copernicus.eu
Sentinel Hub documentation: https://docs.sentinel-hub.com
Sentinel Hub custom scripts: https://custom-scripts.sentinel-hub.com
openEO API specification: https://openeo.org
Copernicus Browser, sentinelhub-py, openEO
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Software engineer at Sinergise (Planet Labs) in Slovenia, working on the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem. Builds and maintains the data onboarding pipeline that makes Earth observation datasets discoverable and accessible through Copernicus Browser and Sentinel Hub APIs.