APPS4GMES - Development of Operational Products and Services for GMES - a Bavarian Initiative
Appel, Florian1; Bach, Heike1; Heege, Thomas2; de la Mar, Jury3; Siegert, Florian4; Rücker, Gernot5
1Vista Remote Sensing in Geosciences GmbH, GERMANY; 2EOMAP GmbH & Co. KG, GERMANY; 3T-Systems International GmbH, GERMANY; 4Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH, GERMANY; 5ZEBRIS Brendel und Rücker GbR, GERMANY
The project APPS4GMES aims to develop prototype service chains based on standardized pre-processed EO data for operational product provision and dissemination. The specific pilot applications (APPS, not necessarily applications on mobile devices) will be provided in the context of agriculture, water quality and quantity, environmental monitoring and climate protection by the different partners.
The challenge of APPS4GMES is the creation of operational pilot services using the Sentinel satellites in terms of handling large data volumes and data streams, as well as automated information extraction and quality assessment. To operate these services efficiently in the long term, the implementation of operational interfaces and data access mechanisms, as well as a quality-controlled processing chain from data preprocessing up to the final product are mandatory.
The consortium consists of four Bavarian SMEs (VISTA, EOMAP, RSS, ZEBRIS) and one international information and communication technology provider (T-Systems).
We will present the concept and technical implementation based on modular system architecture. This architecture allows for a flexible combination of the individual components and services managed and operated by different partners (i.e. service providers) and features a data handling module starting from pre-processed EO products (level 1b) up to the final products and information for the end users and customers.
The main components of the APPS4GMES modular system are:
a common 'input data portal' allowing multi mission data access to EO products of Sentinel and Third Party Mission satellites
a common 'service chain manager' to handle the service chains - and their interactions - of each of the services provided by the partners
a common 'cloud toolkit' to use the cloud infrastructure provided by the project partner T-Systems to take advantage of a scalable service of to handle the thick data stream and large data volumes (Sentinels) and complex model approaches.
a common 'billing manager' to support the calculation of resource consumption and service usage between partners, and billing of customers
and a 'APPS4GMES portal' for allocation of internal and the provision of final products of the individual services.
In addition, standardization issues, as well as the requirements of OGC, are considered for the spatial data management.
As a demonstration module, mobile applications of at least one of the included services will be established. As an example for the application of operational service chains developed within APPS4GMES, the water quantity service will be presented.
One of the main targets of the project is the optimized use of cloud computing as a dynamic service infrastructure, which provides the partners with a scalable access to storage and computing capacities for the different needs of the services. Together with optimized access to the GMES datasets, e.g. in connection with national collaborative ground segments (CollGS), this is considered as a key for successful and economically viable service provision by small and medium enterprises. Thus APPS4GMES could serve as a blueprint for other regional European initiatives.
