CEOS Analysis Ready Data Strategy
CEOS ensures international coordination of civil space-based Earth observation programs and
promotes exchange of data to optimize societal benefit and inform decision making for securing
a prosperous and sustainable future for humankind.
The rapidly evolving domain of information technology has led to greatly enhanced
computational capability and much increased expectations of a broadened user community
familiar with Big Data systems and the benefits of cloud storage and computing, machine
learning, and artificial intelligence. Satellite data is now just one of many sources of information
available to results-driven users and data hungry, automated systems.
Additionally, Earth observation missions are no longer the sole domain of government programs
and space agencies. Miniaturization, standardization and innovation have led to significant new
Earth observation and data access capabilities in the commercial ‘Space 2.0’ sector. This new
presence poses a challenge for CEOS agencies to identify and communicate the distinct role for
government funded missions and to strategically shape the EO landscape to include and
leverage the rapidly emerging capabilities of the commercial sector. Earth observation data from CEOS Agencies have several distinctive characteristics which
ensure their ongoing relevance. Those features include: ● Highly superior platforms and instrumentation, allowing accuracy of observations that are
not possible with systems that are developed with orders of magnitude less cost; ● Robust calibration and validation; ● Long-term data records and measurement continuity;● Their potential to be free and open for all of society, allowing benefits to be delivered
over many end users; ● The authority of trusted and respected government agencies. For these benefits to continue to be realised however requires that agencies adapt their
methods of operation to ensure that data is easy to access – preferably in locations already
favoured by the established IT and user community – and ready to use with minimal additional
processing.
One of the measures proposed to support the objective of simplified data handling was the
pursuit of CEOS Analysis Ready Data (ARD) – which involves data suppliers removing many of
the fundamental data correction and processing tasks from the users, so that more users and
more uses of the data are possible.