Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften

Abstract:
Spatio-temporal analysis capabilities of big Earth observation (EO) data are possible now on various infrastructures, but the transferability and interoperability of analyses remain challenging. This contribution describes an approach for interacting with multiple semantic EO data cubes, where for each observation, at least one nominal (i.e., categorical) interpretation is available and can be queried in the same instance. Our in-house developed Web-based graphical user interface (GUI) provides technical access to multiple semantic EO data cubes, regardless of what infrastructure they are implemented on. It is designed to create semantic models using a graphical language, and an inference engine is able to evaluate these models against existing semantic EO data cubes based on a user’s defined area and timespan of interest. Querying on a semantic level allows the transferability of semantic models across EO data cubes. Our contribution shows an approach towards solving this open research gap and discusses relevant challenges such as transferability of semantic models, on-demand instantiation, and federated EO data cubes. We believe that this approach offers new opportunities for improved semantic and syntactic interoperability in EO analyses and is better positioned to allow semantically-enabled queries possible in a federated EO data cube context.