Big Data Platform for Earth Observation and geospatial data – expected impact in research and business

Overview:

Exploitation of (Big) EO and Geospatial data (mainly from Copernicus and the Sentinels but also from geolocalised sensors and internet-of-things) is an hot topic in current research and industrial debate. Proposer would like to draw the attention on the current experiences on exploiting these data sets and overcome the identified limitations by proposing a Big Data platform for the EO and geospatial research and industry. This session can be considered as a follow-up of the session "Exploitation of Copernicus data in the e-Infrastructures".
We propose a sequence of presentations with moderated discussion which will provide insight and invite constructive discussion about the themes, ideas and opportunities offered by the exploitation of EO and Geospatial Data for several research domains and business sectors. 
The session will be facilitated by Big Data Value Association Geospatial Subgroup leader, Florin Serban (1) and will begin with an introduction and overview of the BDVA Geospatial subgroup mandate which aims to promoting the adoption of Copernicus Big data in relevant market sector to strengthen the Space Industry.
Subsequent talks from other subgroups members will address the following hot topics:
- A critical analysis of state-of-the-art in EO and geospatial data initiatives and related exploitation models. Andrea Manieri (2), Engineering Ing. Inf.spa;
- A sample of shared data ecosystem: the D4Science model. Pasquale Pagano (3), CNR-ISTI;
- Use cases and piloting to boost EO and geospatial industry market sector with Big Data technology and Ecosystem concepts; (Startupper/Web entrepreneur to-be-confirmed);
A facilitated discussion will then encourage participants at the session to explore how the EO and geospatial data merged with research and other data can positively impact different market sectors. At the same time the open debate will lead consensus on which interaction model best apply for the forthcoming digital society and the perspective Digital Single Market.
(1) Dr. Florin Serban is TERRASIGNA’s founder and Managing Director since 2007. He got his PhD in Optical and Radar Satellite Data Fusion in 2000 from the Technical Military Academy in Bucharest. In 1995 he joined the Romanian Space Agency as a researcher in the field of digital image processing and between 2003 and 2006 he was Chief Technologist. From 2000 to 2006 he was consultant for European Space Agency, being responsible with developing LEOWorks - image processing software for educational purposes. He has been PI for more than 30 national and European research projects in Earth Observation, data processing, sensors and big data, and he is still actively involved in data processing and service development activities. He is part of the Board of Directors for the Big Data Value Association (BDVA) since 2015, and he coordinates the subgroup for Space domain in the respective association.
(2) Andrea Manieri (male, PMP - Business Developer) - He is graduated in Computer Science with a master thesis on object oriented lambda calculus with prof. Emeritus C. Boehm. In 2000 he joined EU projects as Technical Manager in the ECOLNET, then in 2002 he was appointed as RTD Coordinator in Engisanità Spa, an Engineering Group company on HealthCare market. On April 2003 he joined again the Engineering labs as responsible of development of new business on Grid Technology establishing a specific unit and contributing to several project in FP6/FP7 project until 2013. In this period he was Exploitation Manager of Diligent project, and Project manager of and EC study (www.erina-study.eu). He was also Project Director of VENUS-C project (FP7 INFRA-261556) and ERINA+ support Action (FP7 INFRA-261550). His Distributed Computing Laboratory contributed to more than twenty FP6 and FP7 initiatives ranging from AAA in distributed environments, Test and quality assurance of distributed software, grid and cloud infrastructures, infrastructure security and legal compliance. He’s trainer in the company Academy “Enrico della Valle” for the Cloud technologies. On Aug 2013 he left the Cloud R&D Lab and he has been tasked to bring Cloud Research result into Company business offering, as Business Developer and Trainer. As such, in the new EC funding program H2020 is coordinating the Company initiatives in the LEIT (ICT and SPACE) and Excellent Science Pillars. Currently is exploring how Data Science can impact on the ENG business in strict collaboration with the Big Data Competence Center, the R/D lab of Content and Media and the ENG Academy. He's currently involved in EDISON, in order to promote the Data Scientist career, he's supporting the Univ. of Perugia in setting-up a Master in Data Science and collaborating with other Universities to promote Data Science curricula.
(3) Senior Researcher at the Networked Multimedia Information Systems Laboratory of the "Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie della Informazione A. Faedo" (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). I received my M.Sc. in Information Systems Technologies from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa (1998), and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the Department of Information Engineering: Electronics, Information Theory, Telecommunications of the same university (2006). The aim of my research is the study and experimentation of models, methodologies and techniques for the design and development of distributed virtual research environments (VREs) which require the handling of heterogeneous computational and storage resources, provided by Grid and Cloud based e-Infrastructures, for the management of heterogenous data sources. I have a strong background on distributed architectures. I participated to the design of the most relevant distributed systems and e-Infrastructure enabling middleware developed by ISTI - CNR. I am currently the Technical Director of D4Science, the Hybrid Data Infrastructure serving more than 2500 scientists in 44 countries, and chief manager of gCube software, the open-source platform for the management and operation of scientific data infrastructures. 
I am also still collaborating with the Data e-Infrastructure Initiative for Fisheries Management and Conservation of Marine Living Resources (iMarine). I am serving the BlueBRIDGE European Project as Technical Director, the Parthenos European Project as Service Operation Manager, and the SoBigData Research Infrastructure as Infrastructure Manager. In the past, I have been involved in the iMarine, EUBrazilOpenBio, Venus-C, GRDI2020, D4Science-II, D4Science, Diligent, DRIVER, DRIVER II, BELIEF, BELIEF II, Scholnet, Cyclades, and ARCA European projects.

Target Audience:

The target audience would be all stakeholders in the Big Data value chain, from data owner, resource and infrastructures providers, industries from the EO and geospatial market sectors, start-uppers and web entrepreneurs from market sectors impacted by EO and geospatial data.

Benefits for Audience:

Our goal is to bridge data owners and resource providers from research and space market with start-uppers, web entrepreneurs as well as scientist of any discipline, in order to identify suitable interaction models and business opportunities with Big Data technologies and EO/geospatial data. Participant will then be aware of what’s going on in the field of Big Data and EO geospatial technologies, what will be the next initiatives and opportunities in the field

Topic 1: Challenges facing users and service providers