EO BALTIC PLATFORM FOR GOVERNMENTAL SERVICES (EO-BALP)

The goal of the EO-BALP project is to develop a cloud service platform for Earth Observation (EO) data access and processing and provide six different applications that will demonstrate the practical use of satellite data in different domains:

• Monitoring application of infrastructure and settlements with more than 60,000 inhabitants, which will help to detect and characterize ground movements from satellite data, and to identify dangerous places in infrastructure protection zones;
• A water quality monitoring application that will help determine water quality and pollution, as well as pollution sources in the Baltic Sea, coastal waters and inland waters;
• A forest change monitoring application, which will help to regularly detect clear-cuts and wind falls, as well as forest damage caused by diseases, pests, fires, water, etc.) and will provide the latest satellite data mosaic service in all Baltic countries;
• An agricultural land monitoring application that will help to assess crops, yield, soil quality, generate burnt area map delineating agricultural lands affected by grassland fires and flooded agriculture field areas.
• Natural resource extraction monitoring application that will help identify illegal resource extraction sites (sand, gravel, etc. mineral resources);
• A maritime monitoring application that will help identify ships, their type, location and movement.

To achieve the technical goals, the initial phase of the project will gather business and functionality requirements from potential end users of the platform, who will also be involved in testing and validating the applications. Currently, various organizations from all Baltic countries have shown their interest in the project and in the possibility of using satellite data, such as the cities of Tallinn and Riga, the Environmental Protection Agency under Ministry of Environment of Lithuania, the Klaipeda State Seaport Authority, the Latvian State Forest Service, the Latvian Peat Association, the Latvian Institute of Aquatic Ecology and many others.

The new EO-BALP platform is planned to be designed in such a way that it can be easily used by users without specific knowledge and also by professionals in the field. The EO platform will enable all participating stakeholders in the three Baltic countries to deploy, operate and deliver EO-based services to national governments and institutions. The platform will therefore support activities allowing users to discover and select data, pre-existing processing services, EO based services, products and applications, visualize and analyze them or select and apply data manipulation tools to the result. The Platform will also allow users to discover and select data samples and software components, upload and validate applications and deploy them on the platform for use also by other users. Users will be able to authenticate, upload and deploy a new application software, discover and select data, process the data and eventually publish the resulting product.

In addition, the interoperability of EO Platform with existing e-government platforms will be ensured, by:

• importing existing geospatial data from governmental and other public/private entities to the platform to be used for provision of specialised services;
• developing functionality allowing to integrate XYZ/TMS, WMS web services and JSON/GeoJSON data from governmental and other public/private entities directly into specialised service web applications;
• publishing all geographic data produced by specialised applications based on standard and widely used web service formats (XYZ/TMS, WMS, GeoJSON) which allow using them by governmental and other public/private entities in their own web applications and in desktop GIS software (QGIS, ArcGIS, etc).