Big Earth data: disruptive changes in Earth observation data management and analysis?

ABSTRACT

Turning Earth observation (EO) data consistently and systematically into valuable global information layers is an ongoing challenge for the EO community. Recently, the term ‘big Earth data’ emerged to describe massive EO datasets that confronts analysts and their traditional workflows with a range of challenges. We argue that the altered circumstances must be actively intercepted by an evolution of EO to revolutionise their application in various domains. The disruptive element is that analysts and end-users increasingly rely on Web-based workflows. In this contribution we study selected systems and portals, put them in the context of challenges and opportunities and highlight selected shortcomings and possible future developments that we consider relevant for the imminent uptake of big Earth data.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital earth
• data access
• satellite data portals
• object-based image analysis (OBIA)
• remote sensing workflow

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Lixia Chu and Dr Mateusz Pawlik for their comments during the work on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through the Doctoral College GIScience (DK W1237-N23). Contributions of Dirk Tiede and Hannah Augustin were supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under the Austrian Space Application Programme (ASAP) within the project Sen2Cube.at (project no.: 866016).