The Earth Observation (EO) community commonly depends on specialised software solution such as so called EO toolboxes which provide specialised and often unique functionality to carry out specific analytics or sensor-specific data manipulations.
Several of these EO toolboxes have been successful in providing critical functionality and in terms of adoption and uptake in the user community. With the ongoing transition from conventional “desktop-based” EO software to cloud based services that run collocated with the large EO data archives, a central question is how key functionality of important EO toolboxes should be transformed into cloud-based EO services.
One example of such an ESA initiated EO toolbox is SEN4CAP, a set of algorithms and workflows to support the EO monitoring needs in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). SEN4CAP has been adopted by various value adding companies to develop dedicated services for CAP monitoring. Moreover, ESA has supported several evolutions of the source code to adapt to the changing requirements of the CAP policy monitoring needs. This approach has proven largely inefficient and in the future a community driven enhancement and evolution approach to the open source code is desirable.
The objective of this ITT is to:
- transform SEN4CAP and its key functionality into a set of modular, cloud-based services will then be deployed in collocation with the EO data archives (i.e., in CDSE) and that can accessed by the users though programming libraries and APIs
- optimise the resulting source code for the SEN4CAP services for open source community maintenance.
Learn more about this Invitation To Tender on the esa-star Publication page.