The European Commission has awarded in December 2017 four contracts to industrial consortia for the development of four cloud-based platforms for Copernicus DIAS. These are ONDA, SOBLOO, CREODIAS and MUNDI. These platforms will bring computing resources close to the data and enable an even greater commercial exploitation of Copernicus data. A fifth DIAS platform is developed by the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the French company Mercator Ocean. Like the TEPs, these five platforms will also bring computing resources close to the data and enable an even greater commercial exploitation of Copernicus data.

The five DIAS online platforms allow users to discover, manipulate, process and download Copernicus data and information. All DIAS platforms provide access to Copernicus Sentinel data, as well as to the information products from Copernicus’ six operational services, together with cloud-based tools (open source and/or on a pay-per-use basis). Each of the five competitive platforms also provides access to additional commercial satellite or non-space data sets as well as premium offers in terms of support or priority. Thanks to a single access point for the entire Copernicus data and information, DIAS allows the users to develop and host new applications in the cloud, while removing the need to download bulky files from several access points and process them locally.

Although the TEPs and DIAS activities funded by ESA have been welcomed by the EO data user community, they both have a significant disadvantage: they target users that are experts in EO data and technologies, and ignore the myriad of software developers that might not be experts in EO but still have a lot to gain by integrating EO data in their applications. Therefore, opening up the TEPs and DIASs by extracting information and knowledge hidden in the data, publishing this information and knowledge using linked data technologies, and interlinking it with data in other TEPs and DIASs and other non-EO data, information and knowledge can be an important way of making the development of downstream applications easy for both EO and non-EO experts.

With respect to the organization of the future Copernicus data access architecture through DIAS, the tools developed by ExtremeEarth belong to the intermediate layers, since they allow the exploitation of the back office resources for the benefit of the various front offices, but also provide the necessary modules to foster EO data analytics and the chaining of value adding activities between different front offices. When the five DIAS will become operational, the ExtremeEarth technologies will also be demonstrated in a selected DIAS.