Cloud-based e-science drivers for ESAs Sentinel Collaborative Ground Segment Kostas Koumandaros Greek Research & Technology Network Open Science retreat February 22-23, 2016 Amsterdam

Sentinels Collaborative Ground Segment Reliable access to Copernicus data by the broad user community is key to the success of the overall Copernicus programme. The large amount of data generated by the Copernicus Space Component, together with the evolving user needs, represents the major challenge towards meeting this objective. The Copernicus Space Component Ground Segment data access is ensuring that at any point in time any user has access to all available Sentinels core products. The Data Access Network concept will be based on a system of access points, called Data Access Nodes (DANs) The DANs are independently accessible by the users and behave as autonomous gateways offering access to the whole set of supported data sets, providing its own products/services The network is built on the principle that every participating DAN should also allow making additional products/services provided by federated nodes visible to its user community, as well as authorise visibility of its products/services for users of other nodes. This means that for the other nodes, the node would act as a “relay” in the sense that it retrieves product collections not available locally in order to make them available to its own users. In other words, the Data Access Node acts as a “proxy” server for the other nodes. 2

European Commission’s High level presentation of Options for Copernicus Access Platform(s) Discussion paper 3

European Association of Remote Sensing Companies European Market Place for Earth Observation Services 4

Sentinels Collaborative Ground Segment workshop #11 (7 December 2015) Recommendation 8: The Commission and ESA should continue the jointly coordinated efforts to address the overall vision of creating an E2E industrial eco-system comprising e.g. data provider, ICT industry, EO industry and users. To this end it is recommended to engage key ICT players to identify a specific gap filling activities to support the handling of large EO data 5

Copernicus–Roadmap for an Integrated Ground Segment I Commission paper revised, as of 20 Nov Short-term issues for the Ground Segment and Big Data (among others…) Identifying and ensuring the availability of critical elements needed to enable the exploitation of (big) data/information (cf. section III. below): the development of innovative services or applications will benefit if value-adding users are able to discover, access and process together a variety of data/information from EO and non-EO domains. Building on the work ongoing in the Commission and other relevant fora, and based on future user needs, a review of enabling regulations, technologies, interoperability conventions and standards should be undertaken to identify missing elements, focussing on EO data and services in a first step. A particular emphasis should be put on the following three areas: – i. The current status of interoperability of EO data (i.e. data formats, meta-data standards, hardware/software applications standards). – ii. Data discovery, search and catalogues: while these functions are already implemented for Copernicus, it is recognised that an improvement of the current catalogues as well as the emergence of additional catalogue services through which Copernicus data and information can be discovered, possibly alongside other data/services, would increase the likelihood of discovery and downstream use (e.g. availability of a consolidated catalogue). While being compliant with INSPIRE standards (including their possible evolution), the most appropriate concepts to be used to enable independent initiatives in this domain should be investigated. – iii. Assessment of existing Big Data exploitation environments and the opportunities they offer, prevailing standards and identification of the most promising options for Copernicus to join/adopt. 6

Copernicus–Roadmap for an Integrated Ground Segment II Mid- to Long-term issues Big Data, advanced web-services and hosted processing: Copernicus should bring in innovative European ICT solutions for multiplying the access channels and modes of EO data/information/service consumption. This could take the form of access- and processing-platforms to facilitate the deployment of new EO applications by intermediate users for the benefit of final users. Such ICT solutions could offer the following functions: – i. Generic software layers or libraries facilitating the management or automated exploitation of Copernicus data and information in a cloud or HPC environment; – ii. Advanced web-services enabling increased exploitation of data and information through standard APIs; – iii. Virtual machine facilities with the possibility for registered users to integrate their own compiled software modules and processors as 'black box'. – iv. Provision of application development environment for developers ; – v. Resource management, including the provision of a basic 'free-of-charge' processing service and the option to buy additional processing power from the Service provider; – vi. Provision of ICT and EO applications, products or services by (commercial and downstream) third party providers via application libraries ("app-stores"), and facilitating their distribution (e.g. inclusion in catalogues, prioritisation); – vii. User assistance and support to user communities (e.g. helpdesk, tutorials, hotlines, etc.) 7