The Group on Earth Observation (GEO) is a partnership of more than 200 national governments and another organisations that envisions a future where decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated and sustained Earth observations.
The GEO community is creating a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) to integrate observing systems and share data by connecting existing infrastructures. There are more than 200 million open data resources in GEOSS from over 150 national and regional providers (such as NASA and European Space Agency).
NextGEOSS is a 3.5 year project serving as a European contribution to GEOSS by developing the next generation hub for Earth Observation (EO) data where users can access data and deploy EO-based applications. The NextGEOSS project consortium is made of 27 organisations from 13 European countries, who recently met in Lisbon from 16 to18 January to kick-off project activities.
NextGEOSS objectives:
- Implement a single access point, federated data hub using state-of-the-art data mining and discoverability techniques.
- Implement Quality of Service and community feedback mechanisms on the data hub.
- Access to the most relevant data sources for Europe, across all major Earth Observation domains.
EGI and NextGEOSS
EGI will contribute to NextGEOSS with computing resources made available through the EGI Federated Cloud allowing the project to connect data and cloud computing resources to user communities and enable an integrated network of application support. This will initially be demonstrated through a number of scientific and business oriented pilots where EGI will offer technical advice and consultancy to identify the best solutions to get the applications up and running on an integrated cloud platform.
NextGEOSS will also stimulate data exploitation by commercial enterprises with a number of business-oriented pilots, therefore EGI will support the defining formal agreements for long-term business relationships beyond the life of the project.
