rasdaman newsletter 10/2016

Ready for INSPIRE - Reference Implementation rasdaman in Action at Intergeo

Oktober 2016. This year the annual INTERGEO fair was held at Hamburg/Germany from Oktober 11 through 13. The rasdaman company was represented witha fair booth, a congress keynote talk on INSPIRE WCS and a workshop demonstrating solutions for dealing with it. Highlights included realtime intercontinental weather/satellite image fusion and ultrafast on-demand cloud processing.

Jacobs University demonstrated in a one-hour-session the radically simplified handling of spatio-temporal sensory, images, weather data, and more based on Web requests following the open OGC standards WCS, WCS-T, and WCPS. Critically important, all components of the WCS suite are seamlessly harmonized.

In the first part of the presentation, implementation and potential of INSPIRE coverage data and WCS was outlined: Member State institutions have to make their coverage data conformant to the INSPIRE directive before 2020, and coverages occur across many, if not most of the Annex II and III themes. According to INSPIRE experts the list is long indeed: Orthoimagery, Elevation, Geology, Atmospheric conditions and Meteorological geographical features, Oceanographic geographical features, Soil, Land cover, Natural risk zones, Energy resources, and more.

Concretely, in the scope of INSPIRE raster data shall be implemented and made available as coverages according the concepts stemming from OGC coverages, ISO 19123 and other related standards currently in force. To this end, INSPIRE is establishing a Web Coverage Service (WCS) based on the OGC WCS standard adopted in 2012. This INSPIRE WCS has been published in a draft version, and comments from the member states have been collected.

In the second part of the presentation a live demo showed how straightforward coverage services can be. In the talk and at the rasdaman booth visitors experienced live ingestion of NetCDF files and their retrieval as TIFF files. It took just a simple change in one configuration file to switch from mosaicking to timeseries generation in the database. The open-ended capabilities of the OGC geo analytics language, Web Coverage ProcessingService (WCPS), was impressively shown. In the Amazon cloud, a Terabyte of data was analyzed in about 100 milliseconds. Heavy rainfall risk areaswere determined in realtime through automatically orchestrated queries combining ECMWF in the UK and NCI in Australia.

Contact: Dr. Peter Baumann, rasdaman GmbH.