Public/Private Datacube Partnership Launched

November 30, 2018 -- Datacubes are trending, and with the rasdaman datacube engine they can even be federated across data centers. Users benefit from location transparency and planetary-scale fusion services. Now public and private datacubes get federated - which, however, raises new technical challenges in terms of security and billing.

The BigDataCube project, supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, aims at advancing the innovative datacube paradigm - i.e., analysis-ready spatio-temporal raster data - from scientific into commercial data centers. To this end rasdaman, "the worldwide leading" (ESA, 2017) datacube technology, is getting installed on the public Sentinel hub CODE-DE as well as in the commercial cloud environment of cloudeo AG. A specific new challenge on which BigDataCube focuses is versatile role-based access control on datacubes, configurable down to the level of single pixels.

Under the lead of Jacobs University the team of rasdaman GmbH (datacube backend), cloudeo AG (commercial geo cloud), and DLR (weather and ocean analytics tool) collaborate on these services. On CODE-DE, the datacube service is going to complement the batch-oriented, Hadoop-based service of CODE-DE with interactive spatio-temporal viewing, fusion, and analytics services on Sentinel satellite imagery, based on the open OGC standards.

At this stage, the cloudeo datacube and the DLR analytics tool on top of rasdaman are operational, and so is the precursor version of the CODE-DE datacube service. This precursor has been established while CODE-DE is preparing the infrastructure for the datacube engine. Based on sample Sentinel 1 and 2 timeseries it offers a broad set of access, formatting, filtering, processing, and general analytics functionality through a variety of common Web clients.