Sentinel-1, the first Earth observation satellite to be built for Europe’s Global Monitoring for Environment and Security ‘Copernicus’ programme. © ESA/ATG Medialab.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is calling for input on its draft charter on a proposed Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Domain Working Group (DWG).

The intention underpinning this proposal is to establish a baseline of interoperability between platforms offering access to Earth Observation data, to facilitate the linking of such proprietary portals and establishment of an ecosystem that may serve complex use cases that require many sources.

In their call for comment, the OGC outlines a scenario that describes their vision:

‘A scientist assessing climate changes may need data across several providers – from vegetation indexes, to predictive rainfall models and more – in order to answer a research question. Standardized elements of EO Exploitation Platforms could provide a single interface for this climate scientist where each ‘cloud’ talks to each other in the background, sharing the data, applications, tools and services between the platforms to generate a final result for the scientist.’

OGC points out that the European Space Agency (ESA)’s EO exploitation platforms currently operating share a range of functionality that could be used as a starting point for standardisation, including data provisioning, information visualisation and analysis, data processing and user authentication; authorisation and accounting.

The Earth Observation Exploitation Platform DWG draft charter is available for review and comment at the OGC Portal until May 30, 2018.