Earth Observation Exploitation Platforms (EPs) is an initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA), aiming to create various ecosystems of interconnected platforms, based on thematic and/or regional approaches.
The initiative is a set of research and development activities, deployed as collaborative, virtual work environments that access EO data and tools, information and communication technologies resources, through coherent interfaces.

The Exploitation Platforms concept is to move the user close to the data and tools.
Users access a platform work environment providing the data, tools, and resources required, as opposed to downloading, replicating, and exploiting data ‘at home’.

The existing Copernicus Sentinel missions, along with the future similar ones, will deliver an unprecedented amount of data - Sentinel-1 constellation alone generates 10TB of data daily. While the availability of this growing volume of environmental data represents a unique opportunity for science and applications, it also poses a major challenge to achieve its full potential in terms of data exploitation.  

Both thematic and regional Exploitation Platforms address these technical challenges related to the huge amounts of Earth Observation data. Their virtual workspaces provide the users community with access to:

  • Large volumes of both EO and non-space data;
  • Processing software and services;
  • Algorithm development and integration environment;
  • Computing resources and hosted processing (cloud computing);
  • Collaboration/networking opportunities.

TERRASIGNA’s capabilities are actively involved and contribute to the development of these exploitation platforms.

 

 

 

 


 

Coastal Thematic Exploitation Platform (C-TEP) address one the most dynamic environments on earth - the coastal zones. We are part of a the ten partners’ consortium, based in six European countries.
Our role within the C-TEP project is to provide regional platform development and operation, develop a pilot case on the Black Sea, develop and supply statistical libraries, develop interconnection within the TEP and provide a C-TEP interface mock up.
Details about C-TEP here.

Stakeholders’ requirements from particular geographic regions may diverge significantly from those working in specific thematic domains, even though information requests may cover several thematic domains.
A regional based approach provides premises for better match between EO capabilities and regional initiatives, including new and local business development.
 
The Pathfinder - the EO4SEE project is a regional exploitation platform, that assesses and processes high volumes of data in the South East Europe. It is the only platform of this kind in the region, coordinated by TERRASIGNA, built with Romanian technologies, and developed with key partners from Czech Republic and Poland.

Pathfinder capitalizes our expertise in this part of the Europe, where we have built the knowledge (both GIS and IT) for providing vital information about the South East Europe ecosystems - Black Sea, Danube river and Delta, Carpathians Mountains.

 The Pathfinder in brief, in below video, and detailed info here.

All these present and future exploitation platforms allow our scientists and technology information specialists to demonstrate our competences.

Technologies like information mining, data extraction, time-series analytics and fusion can transform zettabytes of geo-information data into meaningful insights, that impact our everyday lives.

See River Ice Extent - Pathfinder Use case.