The Sister Projects working together to build the Green Deal Data Space in the OEMC Global Workshop in Vienna

In early October, Vienna welcomed members from various projects from the EuroGEO Action Group on the Green Deal Data Space for two significant events. The Open Earth Monitor (OEMC) project organized its annual Global Workshop from the 2nd to the 4th October, which had as its central topic the transfer of Earth Observation knowledge from research to actual policy. Aligned with this vision, the EuroGEO Action Group member projects decided that it was relevant that the European strategy for data spaces, and in particular its progress towards the future establishment of a Green Deal Data Space, should be present at this event.

Pre-Meeting in the Natural History Museum of Vienna

Thus, during the days leading up to the event, from Monday 30 September to Tuesday 01 October, the AD4GD, FAIRICUBE, USAGE and BCubed projects organized a pre-meeting on the premises of the Natural History Museum of Vienna. In this working session, the projects participants worked face-to-face and hands-on on topics such as metadata models, data provision, observable properties and data processing. The approaches of the projects were compared and efforts to converge to a common view will continue along these lines. The importance of adding support for provenance information was emphasized. The use of standards specific for observation such as the Sensor Things API and for coverages such as OGC API coverages and OpenEO was tested. In addition, a common roadmap for the communication and dissemination of the joint results was proposed, including joint participation in some events in the coming months.

Data Spaces Session in the OEMC Global Workshop

On the 3rd of October, the projects AD4GD, USAGE, FAIRICUBE and OEMC engaged in a joint session on dataspaces, entitled “Data Spaces: the EC solution for environmental, biodiversity and climate challenges”.

Ivette Serral, member of the AD4GD project introduced the session by explaining how the Green Deal Data Space is the data infrastructure devised by the European Commission to support implementing Green Deal policies with relevant data, assuring trust and security of data exchanges and contributing to better environmental transparency and decision-making.

After that, Joan Masó, coordinator of AD4GD, showcased the project’s vision on the issue. AD4GD identified two cohabitating visions on Earth Observation data, object based and gridded based, which could be interconnected using semantic tagging both for data and metadata. Masó also showcased the TAPIS tool, a client for the OGC Sensor Things API plus (https://github.com/joanma747/TAPIS), an example of habitat connectivity comparison using OpenData Cube and OGC API Coverage (https://github.com/AD4GD/Component-OAPI_CoveragesForODC), and some of the progress being done with Eclipse Connectors.

Next in line was Kathi Schleidt, member of the FAIRICUBE project which introduced the origin of their initiative as a way of digitizing biodiversity occurrence data and combining it with currently available Earth Observation data in a FAIR and trustable manner. Schleidt exhibited some of their requirements for the GDDS which include an interoperable metadata framework, a focus on emerging OGC APIs and OpenEO for data access, the implementation of agreed and enriched vocabularies and conceptual models and future work on the potential of ML and AI for analysis and processing.

Following the conversation, Giacomo Martirano, introduced the USAGE project in which they are working in 4 prototype urban data spaces being implemented in 4 pilot cities. Martirano explained that USAGE is utilizing a GeoNetwork-based catalog for publishing metadata, the same approach taken by AD4GD, as well as carrying out semantic harmonization of decision ready information based on the INSPIRE data models. They are also developing a non-technical validation approach, in which they simulate a board with members representing different roles covering from decision makers to citizens, including policy, legal and data experts.

Finally, Milutin Milenkovic, member of OEMC was also participating in the session. OEMC is focusing on FAIR science mainly through Open Data licenses and data and metadata repositories and catalogs, which is a challenge due to the great amount and diversity of datasets they deal with. For example, all datasets have to undergo a FAIR validation process before getting published. Another challenge for the project is to aim for FAIR, open and Cloud-optimized data at a time.

This week of collaborative work allowed the sister projects to experiment with and test different technologies and share experiences on components that may become part of the implementation of the Green Deal Data Space in the near future.