The Open Science and Innovation Vision included in ESA’s EO Science Strategy (2024) addresses 8 key elements: 1) openness of research data, 2) open-source scientific code, 3) open access papers with data and code; 4) standards-based publication and discovery of scientific experiments, 5) scientific workflows reproducible on various infrastructures, 6) access to education on open science, 7) community practice of open science; and 8) EO business models built on open-source. EarthCODE (https://earthcode.esa.int) is a strategic ESA EO initiative to support the implementation of this vision.

EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) aims towards an integrated, cloud-based, user-centric development environment for European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth science activities and projects. EarthCODE looks to maximise long-term visibility, reuse and reproducibility of the research outputs of such projects, by leveraging FAIR and open science principles and enabling, thus fostering a sustainable scientific process. EarthCODE proposes a fully open-source flexible and scalable architecture developed with interoperable open-source blocks, with a long-term vision evolving by incrementally integrating industrially provided services from a portfolio of the Network of Resources. EarthCODE platform collaborators participate in creating integrated architecture, with interoperable solutions and federated capabilities. Additionally, EarthCODE is a utilisation domain of EOEPCA+ (https://eoepca.org/), thus contributing to the development and evolution of Open Standards and protocols to enable internationally interoperable solutions.

EarthCODE will provide an Integrated Development Platform, giving developers the tools needed to develop high quality workflows that allow experiments to be executed in the cloud and be end-to-end reproduced by other scientists. EarthCODE is built around existing open-source solutions, building blocks and platforms, such as the Open Science Catalogue, EOxHub and EOEPCA. It has additionally begun to integrate platform services from DeepESDL, Euro Data Cube, Polar TEP and the openEO federation on CDSE platforms, with more being added annually through ESA best practices. With it’s adopted federated approach, EarthCODE will have the capability to facilitate processing on other platforms, i.e. DeepESDL, ESA EURO Data Cube, Open EO Cloud/Open EO Platform and AIOPEN/AI4DTE.

The roadmap for the portal includes the initial portal release by end of 2024, followed by the capability to publish experiments in Q1 2025 (including development, publishing, finding and related community engagement), and by mid-2025 to have a further release with reproducibility capabilities around accessibility and execute functionalities.

Collaboration and Federation are at the heart of EarthCODE. As EarthCODE evolves we expect providing solutions allowing federation of data and processing. EarthCODE has ambition to deliver a model for a Collaborative Open Development Environment for Earth system science, where researchers can leverage the power of the wide range of EO platform services available to conduct their science, while also making use of FAIR Open Science tools to manage data, code and documentation, create end-to-end reproducible workflows on platforms, and have the opportunity to discover, use, reuse, modify and build upon the research of others in a fair and safe way. Overall, EarthCODE aims to enable elements for EO Open Science and Innovation vision, including open data, open-source code, linked data/code, open-access documentation, end-to-end reproducible workflows, open-science resources, open-science tools, and a healthy community applying all the elements in their practice.

The ‘Exploitation Platform’ concept derives from the need to access and process an ever-growing volume of data. Many web-based platforms have emerged - offering access to a wealth of satellite Earth Observation (EO) data. Increasingly, these are collocated with cloud computing resources and applications for exploiting the data. Rather than downloading the data, the exploitation platform offers a cloud environment with access to EO data and associated compute and tools that facilitate the analysis and processing of large data volumes. The Exploitation Platform benefits users, data providers and infrastructure providers. Users benefit from the scalability & performance of the cloud infrastructure, the added-value services offered by the platform – and avoid the need to maintain their own hardware. Data hosted in the cloud infrastructure reaches a wider audience and Infrastructure Providers gain an increased cloud user base.

Users are beginning to appreciate the advantages of exploitation platforms. However, the market now offers a plethora of platforms with various added value services and data access capabilities. This ever-increasing offer is rather intimidating and confusing for most users. Users often face challenges such as inconsistent interfaces, proprietary software and limited interoperability. To fully exploit the potential of these complementary platform resources we anticipate the need to encourage interoperation amongst the platforms, such that users of one platform may consume the services of another directly platform-to-platform.

EOEPCA (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture - https://eoepca.org/) is a European Space Agency (ESA) funded project with the goal to define and agree a re-usable exploitation platform architecture using standard interfaces to encourage interoperation and federation between operational exploitation platforms - facilitating easier access and more efficient exploitation of the rapidly growing body of EO and other data. Interoperability through open standards is a key guiding force for the Common Architecture. EOEPCA adheres to standards from organisations such as Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follows best practices in data management, including implementation of OGC Web Services and emerging OGC API specifications for features, coverages and processes. Platform developers are more likely to invest their efforts in standard implementations that have wide usage; off-the-shelf clients and software are more likely to be found for standards-based solutions.

The EOEPCA system architecture is designed to meet a set of defined use cases for various levels of user, from expert application developers to data analysts and end users. The architecture is defined as a set of Building Blocks (BBs), exposing well-defined open-standard interfaces. These include Identity and Access Management, Resource Discovery, Data Access, Processing Workflows, Data Cube Access, Machine Learning Operations, and more. Each of these BBs are containerized for Kubernetes deployment, which provides an infrastructure-agnostic deployment target.

The exploitation platform is conceived as a ‘virtual work environment’ where users can access data, develop algorithms, conduct analysis and share their value-adding outcomes. The EOEPCA architecture facilitates this through a Workspace BB that provides collaboration environments for projects (groups of users) including dedicated storage and services for analysis, processing and publishing of added-value data and applications. This is supported by an Application Hub building-block that provides interactive web-tooling for analysis, algorithm development, data exploitation and provides a web dashboard capability through which added-value outcomes can be showcased.

Our presentation will highlight the generalised architecture, standards, best practice and open source software components available.