Overview

EO Exploitation Platform Common Architecture (EOEPCA)

The availability of free and open data, such as that provided by the Copernicus Sentinel fleet, together with the availability of affordable computing resources, create an opportunity for the wide adoption and use of Earth Observation (EO) data in all fields of our society. ESA’s “EO Exploitation Platforms” initiative aims at facilitating adoption with the paradigm shift from “bring the data to the user” (i.e. user downloads data locally) to “bring the user to the data” (i.e. move user exploitation to hosted environments with collocated computing and storage). This leads to a platform-based ecosystem that provides infrastructure, data, compute and software as a service. The resulting Exploitation Platform is where scientific and value adding activities are conducted, to generate targeted outputs for end-users.

The goal of the “Common Architecture” is to define and agree the technical interfaces for the future exploitation of Earth Observation data in a distributed environment. The Common Architecture will thus provide the interfaces to facilitate the federation of different EO resources into a “Network of EO Resources”. The “Common Architecture” will be defined using open interfaces that link the different resources (building blocks) so that a user can efficiently access and consume the disparate services of the “Network of EO Resources”.

Telespazio VEGA UK - a Leonardo and Thales company will lead the definition of the Common Architecture through an open process of public discussion and consensus building with the EO community. It will be promoted as a Reference Architecture that will be designed to meet a broad set of use cases that cover Federated Identity Management, Processing & Chaining, and Data Access and Management. Leveraging free and open source software, a reusable Reference Implementation will be developed and deployed operationally, to act as a validation of the architecture and to provide an existing solution to third-parties.

GitHub

Please see our GitHub project at https://github.com/eoepca.

Our public documentation and development work is hosted here for review and feedback.

Documents

System-level

Use Case Analysis Document (UCAD): https://eoepca.github.io/use-case-analysis/

Master System Design Document (MSDD): https://eoepca.github.io/master-system-design/

Master System Interface Control Document (MSICD): https://eoepca.github.io/master-system-icd/

User Management

Policy Enforcement Point (PEP)

Policy Decision Point (PDP)

Processing & Chaining

Application Deployment & Execution Service (ADES)

Resource Management

Coming soon…​

Resources

ESA Phi-week 2020

A Common Architecture Supporting Interoperability - YouTube video

Living Planet Symposium 2019

Introduction to EOEPCA - PowerPoint Presentation (PDF)