Objectives of the Product

Cube4All aims at a commercial Earth data service leveraging the advantages of open standards-based data­cube analytics. It makes complex EO tasks simple, keeping simple tasks simple, and unleashing EO analytics and fusion for non-EO/non-IT experts while increasing the productivity of experts.

The resulting service will stand out through:

• genuine datacube services on several public Copernicus and further data offerings, including DIASs, CODE-DE and further large-scale data archives in a seamless manner.
• allowing customers to either rent these services or rent their own pre-confectioned datacube service (private or public) on owned data, or any combination.
• a more user-friendly approach, probably conv­enient for IT/EO experts and non-experts alike, from extraction to analytics without any programm­ing.
• a seamless integration of Copernicus and INSPIRE data.
• providing configurable access control for data offered by cust­omers.
• offering a particularly flexible, fair, and attractive billing model.
• APIs strictly based on the OGC/ISO/IN­SPIRE standards, WCS, WCPS, WMS, and OAPI-Coverages.
• being operated on a completely open-source software.

Customers will be able to access existing archives in a massively simplified way as curated datacubes, without any programming skills. This allows users without IT and EO coding expertise to unleash the potential of the mass of EO data assets.

In any case, from a user perspective, services stand out by simplifying access to Petabytes of Sentinel timeseries, climate variables, DEMs, and them­atic products for location-transparent mix-and-match without programming; proven real-time perform­ance; wide range of common tasks prefabricated, continuously extended; versatile analytics, from standing queries to exploratory – any query, any time; fully customisable work­flows; transparent and competitive pricing. Users remain in the comfort zone of well-known clients.

Customers and their Needs

• Customers who need analytics of EO data in space and time, without having their own raster data.
• Analytics of EO data in space and time, mixing owned and external raster data.
• Customer’s need to have their own raster data easily accessible (inhouse or externally),
  but do not have the skills or time to maintain a server.
• Customers who need to engage Big EO Data in proprietary algorithms, including proprietary data, with demanding and changing customer requirements.

Targeted customer/users’ countries

Worldwide

Product description

Approach: The existing DIAS, CODE-DE, and other public rasdaman datacube services estab­lish­ed in research projects (ex: https://processing.code-de.org/rasdaman), with their existing WMS / WCS / WCPS capabilities, will be more user-friendly and e-commerce will be ready for rasdaman-as-a-service.

Features to be added include a prototype of a novel, interactive data analytics technique, Query-by-Dialog (QBD), which aims at enabling users to do analytics without coding, without even writing high-level queries.

Added Value

Cube4All will make complex tasks simple and keeping simple tasks simple. It unleashes EO analytics and fusion for non-EO/non-IT experts while increasing the productivity of experts.

Current Status

By the end of the project a clear success of the activities can be observed:

The new business model, enhancing the traditional licence business, is embraced by customers and has led to substantial revenues already, e.g., with Telefonica. Interest in rasdaman has increased significantly, as measured, for example, in the number of downloads of the rasdaman community. The clear definition of EO and non-EO target verticals has helped focusing better on customer groups. Examples include Telefonica and the NATO-funded project Cube4EnvSec. An ESA Network of Resources application has been filed in Fall 2022.

Technology has advanced significantly with key features relevant for customer adoption, in particular: simplification of zero-coding EO management and analytics through increased intelligence and automation and also a versatile visual datacube frontend. Airbus has joined the consortium due to its interest in the rasdaman datacube technology.

As such, Cube4All has substantially helped the rasdaman SME to shape and extend its business model and hence optimised its success chances in the EO market and beyond.