FOSS4G:UK South West 2024 Presentations

EarthCODE as a reproducible science platform, influenced by EOEPCA+ workflow and data standards

Speakers

Garin is a Ground Segment Architect specialising in Reproducible Science, AI (Artificial Intelligence), ARD (Analysis Ready Data) and Quality initiatives in the space industry. Heavily involved in the architecture of Open Source solutions, frameworks and platforms. Richard is an experienced (30 years) software engineer, architect and technical lead. Richard is the system architect for ESA’s EOEPCA project (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture), and participates in the OGC EO Exploitation Platform Domain Working Group. Richard was previously the technical architect for the Copernicus Climate Data Store (CDS), and for the renewal of the Jupiter 2 Control Centre in the Guiana Space Centre, Kourou.

EarthCODE Overview

The EarthCODE (Earth Science Collaborative Open Development Environment) vision provides an integrated, cloud-based, user-centric development environment, supporting ESA’s science activities and projects. Building on European EO open-source ecosystem and Open Earth System Science community activities (including EOEPCA+, the Open Science Catalogue and EOxHub), ESA is implementing EarthCODE as a collaborative platform for conducting Earth System Science sustainably, adhering to FAIR and Open Science Principles.

EarthCODE will provide an Integrated Development Platform, giving developers tools needed to develop high quality workflows, allowing experiments to be executed in the cloud and the reproduced by other scientists. As EarthCODE evolves, it will allow the federation of data and processing, allowing EarthCODE to have the potential to facilitate processing on other platforms, i.e. DeepESDL, ESA EURO Data Cube, Open EO Cloud/Platform and AIOPEN/AI4DTE. EarthCODE has ambition to deliver a model for a Collaborative Open Development Environment for Earth system science. Researchers will be able to leverage the power of wide ranging 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. Scientists would also 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 data volumes. Many web-based platforms, with cloud computing resources, have emerged - offering access to a wealth of satellite EO data and facilitating the analysis and processing of large data volumes in a scalable manner. To fully exploit the potential of complementary platform resources, interoperation is needed amongst them, such that platform users may consume the services of another, platform-to-platform.

EOEPCA+ Overview

EOEPCA+ (EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture), an ESA funded project, aims to define a re-usable exploitation platform architecture, with standard interfaces, encouraging interoperation and federation between operational exploitation platforms. This facilitates easier access and efficient exploitation for EO and other data. Interoperability through open standards is key for the Common Architecture, where platform developers would likely invest efforts in standard implementations having wide usage.

The EOEPCA+ system architecture is designed to meet defined use cases for various user levels, from expert application developers to consumers. The system capabilities are defined as a set of Building Blocks (software components) exposing well-defined open-standard interfaces. The Building Blocks provide capabilities for Discovery, Processing, Data Access & Visualisation, Datacube semantics for analysis, Machine Learning, Dashboards to showcase research outcomes, Federation, and more, all supported by a framework for Identity & Access Management. Each of these Building Blocks are containerised for cloud-native Kubernetes, providing 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 value-adding outcomes.