rasdaman newsletter 10/2025
From Petabytes to Policy
A new open access study shows how Germany’s authorities can securely transform massive Earth Observation data into scalable, standards-based public services. Using a rasdaman-powered datacube, the research outlines how cloud and on-premise infrastructures unite for reliable, AI-ready applications.
A new open access study by the Julius Kühn Institute, German Environment Agency, DLR, University of Bonn, and Constructor University demonstrates how a rasdaman-powered datacube turns Earth Observation (EO) big data into secure, standards-based services.
The SDI operates in a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) hosting geodatabases, metadata, and web services, securely extending into the German Copernicus Data and Exploitation Platform (CODE-DE). Within the DMZ, the JKI datacube runs on the rasdaman array database, managing multi-dimensional raster time series and serving them via OGC standards (WMS, WMTS, WCS) with analytics through OGC/ISO WCPS queries. CODE-DE, hosted in Frankfurt, combines Copernicus data with certified compute cloud services compliant with ISO 27001 and INSPIRE. By April 2025, it catalogued about 2 Petabytes of data, integrated into JKI’s DMZ via an OpenVPN-secured connection.
Two use cases highlight the potential: a parcel-level demonstrator merging datasets across JKI and CODE-DE, and a nationwide application monitoring biodiversity in agriculture, producing maps of winter wheat productivity.
Authored by experts from multiple institutions, the paper presents a practice-tested path for administrations to become data-driven service providers, ensuring scientific evidence reaches policy and practice securely, reproducibly, and at scale.