Global reach through local intelligence

To build an Earth Observation-based service that offers large added-value to your customers, you will need to have a highly accurate picture of what is happening, when and where. To help you with this, the In situ Data Hub will allow you to combine and effectively use a great variety of local (“in situ”) open data sources. This free and open in situ information is essential for finetuning and enhancing satellite-based observations. It could also become an important data source powering your new service or product.

The In situ Data Hub is being developed as an active, multi-source repository with automated discovery, retrieval, harmonisation and transformation services.
This tool will communicate with other systems and provide access to geo-referenced field observations coming from the following innovative and often low-cost open-source terrestrial sources:

• sensor networks,
• independent IoT devices,
• citizen observatories,
• crowdsourcing,
• unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV),
• other online structured (e.g. XML or JSON services, databases, csv or excel files) and unstructured (sensor measurements in web page tables) data sources available.

The In situ Data Hub will provide access to real- and past-time data in a structured way (for machine-machine communication) and an interface that offers users the ability to visualise the spatial information with charts, tables or maps. Data will be exportable from the user interface to excel or csv.

The essential “analysis-ready” layer of in situ datasets provided by the In situ Data Hub will be ready for ingestion into the datacubes of the Big Data Toolbox, making them available for use in a combined, uniform, analytical environment. The tool will offer an automatic publication of the imported datasets to Zenodo and Google Dataset Search.

The datasets of the In situ Data Hub will be made available publicly for anyone interested to access or download for free and can be used for various purposes, including:

• the production of value-added products, particularly in combination with satellite data via the Big Data Toolbox;
• validation of parameters extracted with EO techniques and algorithms;
• training neural networks;
• calibration or visualisation purposes;
• discovering insights based on big data analysis that can combine observations, time and geolocation, etc.;
• services of operational monitoring, warning and reporting to public institutions or businesses.