The Earth Observation (EO) landscape has undergone a significant transformation, with cloud-based platforms offering unprecedented access to satellite data and processing capabilities. Users benefit from these environments, which provide the ability to process data remotely, bypassing traditional download and storage limitations. However, the fragmentation of this ecosystem leaves the users with a complex service offer to evaluate and the fear of vendor lock-in.
Working for an interoperable open solution
With the Common Architecture initiative, ESA aims to unify this fragmented cloud ecosystem for Ground/Space (G/S), EO Science, Research and Development (R&D), and Applications. The goal is to enhance interoperability across platforms to create a seamless network for data access and processing. To achieve this, ESA is establishing best practices and standards for EO exploitation platforms and developing a reference architecture and related implementation. This is based on free open-source software building blocks, which can be used by interested parties to kick-start their projects or make existing platforms interoperable. The architecture relies on open interfaces based on open standards and reuses existing open source components as much as possible, ensuring a truly open solution.
A long-lasting collaborative project
Within the Common Architecture initiative, ESA collaborates with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to promote and advance open standards and best practices and partners with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) to connect with and foster the open source community. The collaboration project has achieved the OSGeo Community Project status.
Launched in 2018, the initiative began with the five-year project called EOEPCA (Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Common Architecture). In September 2023, the initiative entered its second phase under the rebranded name EOEPCA+, welcoming new stakeholders from ESA programmatic activities and external organizations. A new development team has been created and the architecture has undergone a significant upgrade.
EOEPCA+ addresses core areas of EO exploitation architectures, such as:
- Identity and Authorisation Management
- Resources (data, applications, services, …) Discovery and Access
- Data Processing and Federated Workflows
- Machine Learning Operations
- Application Development
- Testing Tooling
- Notification and Automation.
The evolution of the architecture and its software components follows an iterative approach, with use cases being incrementally supported to respond to the evolving needs of the various stakeholders involved.
More information and resources for developers and operators can be found on the EOEPCA Portal.