EOMAP partnering with GeoSolutions to support GMES Master Competition

Ciao a tutti,
we are putting together this blog post to describe the work that we did for our partner EOMAP to support part of the GMES Master Competition (see here for more information on this initiative) for this year.

The GMES Master Competition  rewards on an annual basis the best ideas for services, business cases and applications based on GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) data, with the aim to foster product development and entrepreneurship in Europe. Initiated by the European Space Agency (ESA), the Bavarian Ministry of Economy, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and T-Systems, and supported by the European Commission, European Space Imaging GmbH and Astrium GEO-Information Services.

Now, this is all interesting but let’s get to the most interesting part, the infrastructure we put in place to support the competition as well as its sibling initiative, the ESA App Camp, by ingesting, preprocessing and disseminating temporal series of raster data which are relevant for the GMES effort and therefore falls under the following categories:

  • LAND
  • MARINE ENVIRONMENT
  • ATMOSPHERE
  • EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
  • CLIMATE CHANGE

As mentioned here the final goal was to offers access to various Earth observation data products with an OGC-conform Web Mapping Service WMS. Here you can find the manual that describes how to interact with the pilot GeoServer and here you can find additional information on data served.

Let’s describe now a little better what we have done. Referring to the picture below, we decided to prepare quickly a system that would have been able not only to disseminate data via GeoServer WMS with TIME dimension but also to ingest, preprocess and publish in GeoServer additional data as it was made avaible to the system in real-time.

For disseminating the data we use of course GeoServer. We decided for a simple setup with a cluster composed by two instances a Master, not exposed to the public, and a Slave, exposed to the public. We also prepared a specific flow in GeoBatch to ingest and preprocess raster data on the fly. Specifically data is sent as GeoTiff files via FTP to GeoBatch which in turns first optimized then ingest them into specific mosaics (using Postgis to index them ) with support for the TIME dimension . The flow we have in place, uses internally a few gdal utilities to reproject, retile and add overviews to incoming GeoTiff files, then the ImageMosaic action takes care of placing the optimized files into the right Postgis indexing table for the resulting mosaic: all done without manual intervention (see picture below, although I would recommend to click to see the corresponding pdf file)!

All this might seem complicated but the truth is that we where able to set this up in little more than 1 week of work thanks to fact that we leverage Open Source tools which we know from the ground up.

It is eventually worth to mention that this work was performed under our GeoSolutions Professional Service, therefore if you have similar needs, do not hesitate to contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,