rasdaman newsletter 01/2017
EarthServer: Experts Attest Significant Progress
Brussels, January 2017 - "The EarthServer-2 project has successfully completed its second milestone and has made significant progress towards the eventual aim of producing a comprehensive big data analytics platform for Earth Science", the European Commission currently attested on the occasion of project´s midterm review performed in Brussels.
Among the main innovation activities, rasdaman, the platform technology of all services, has been extended with new functionalities, such as support for GRIB data and NetCDF ingestion. A new metadata engine, FEMME, has been developed and, over the next period, will be fully integrated with xWCPS, which leads to combined array data and metadata retrieval. Search facilities on both XML-encoded metadata, freetext, and OGC coverages will be an important step as well. Work on mixed queries enabling new user interfaces has been done already, and will be contined. Services for marine, climate, earth observation, and planetary data have been created using the NASA/ESA WebWorldWind visualisation API. Live demonstrations of pilots during the review meeting showed that significant progress has been made in producing high-quality interfaces, as well as in ingesting valuable data resources and integrating new providers, such as ANI.
One of the important results achieved is a dramatic reduction of the amount of data downloaded. While the extraction of data with traditional methods requires users to download all data for the time series, up to Terabytes, with rasdaman users can access data with surgical accuracy, thereby reducing data transfer to Kilobytes. Additionally, access is simplified substantially; for example, users only need to click on the globe for retrieving a timeseries values for this point.
Further, the project has achieved important impact on international big data standardization process. For example, INSPIRE has chosen rasdaman as reference implementation for the INSPIRE WCS Download Service. The technical capability gained during the project, enabled the participating SMEs to substantially strengthen their market footprint.
In the next period, the Petabyte frontier will be attacked, further enhancements will be implemented on service as well as technology level, and "Big Datacube" standardization will be progressed further.
Contact: Dr. Peter Baumann