Bremen, September 2023 – German Start-up Rasdaman GmbH and Airbus Defence and Space announce a collaboration towards the next generation of Earth Observation exploitation services, centred around spatio-temporal datacubes, to pave the way for a dynamic version of the CopDEM for analytics in the cloud.
Datacubes today are acknowledged as the natural, human-centric paradigm for Big Data in Earth Observation (EO) heralding a novel quality of flexible and scalable services. Pioneered by Rasdaman, datacubes are an accepted cornerstone for analysis-ready data (ARD).
Airbus Defence and Space produces a time-series of high-quality EO products, such as its Copernicus Digital Elevation Model (CopDEM). Recognizing the opportunities coming with datacubes, Airbus Defence and Space is collaborating with Rasdaman GmbH on leveraging them. Combining the leads in satellite data and datacube technology unleashes a whole new avenue of opportunities by combining several layers of geospatial data into a multidimensional structure, easily accessible.
Since then, an intensive, fruitful expert collaboration has emerged where development of the next generation of EO services is ongoing. “We add new features by the week, inspired by the impressive quality the data from Airbus Defence and Space have”, shares Prof. Baumann. Via the open standards of OGC and ISO a wide spectrum of clients can attach themselves to the datacubes, from Leaflet, NASA WorldWind and Microsoft Cesium over QGIS to OpenEO, python and R.
Rasdaman GmbH is a start-up based in Bremen, Germany, and world technology leader in this domain, repeatedly confirmed by benchmarks and innovation awards. Mission of the German-based academic Hi-Tech spinoff is to enable users and providers of spatio-temporal sensor, imagery, image time series, simulation, and statistics data with user-friendly, fast, scalable, and flexible insight tools at the highest service quality. The company offers 360° support around datacubes, from on-premise licences over managed services in clouds over zero-coding “datacubes to go” on Copernicus and other archives. Further, the company is critically contributing, often leading, in datacube standardisation. The rasdaman engine is the official OGC Reference Implementation and EU INSPIRE Good Practice.
Ambition of Airbus Defence and Space is to be the leading provider of insightful and actionable Intelligence, with the capacity to serve our diverse customers all along their value chain – from trusted data to integration and processing of tailored solutions. Airbus Defence and Space is able to create a comprehensive situational awareness picture and deliver sophisticated end-to-end solutions adapted to defence, commercial and institutional markets.
