Within Europe there is a extensive range of EO based information products and services currently available. The role of the Industry Growth line of the EO Science for Society Element is to strengthen the capability of European industry to exploit EO data in the generation, delivery and utilization of geo-information services. This is structured as three areas of activity:
- Expand demand – where ESA issues invitations to tender to support the embedding of EO based data analytics with the data analytics capabilities being developed in a set of priority market sectors. Contracts have been kicked off to address the oil and gas industry and the insurance industry and further tenders will be issued later in 2018
- Establish best practices –under this activity, ESA intends to address the blockages in many market sectors limiting EO uptake due to the requirement to comply with industrial best practices or legislation. ESA is funding activities addressing priority market sectors and establishing best practices for the use of EO data in all of the use cases applicable to the market sector being addressed.
- Support new actors and new opportunities – this line consists of setting up dedicated demonstration exercises involving small satellite operators to verify the added value of their data products and to validate the performance levels that can be attained in operational situations with respect to acquisition reliability, latency, etc. In addition, under this line, a set of pathfinder developments linked to integrating state of the art Machine Learning capabilities within expanded EO applications is being set up. Two area of immediate interest are the combination of deterministic modeling and data driven analyses to characterize complex processes (eg ecosystem functioning, response to climate change drivers) and expanding conventional machine learning based characterization and classification approaches to work on the combination of video data and image data.