52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Testbed is an annual research and development program that explores geospatial technology from various angles. It takes the OGC standards baseline into account, but at the same time allows for exploration of selected aspects from a different perspective.

“OGC Testbeds are OGC’s largest Innovation Program (IP) initiatives. Testbeds boost research and development to make location data and information more FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-Usable. Testbeds provide a unique opportunity for sponsors to tackle location data and processing challenges together with the world’s leading geospatial IT experts.

In a collaborative effort, all Testbed participants, sponsors, and the OGC team work jointly on the goal to stepwise increase Technology Readiness Levels (TRL) of geospatial IT solutions, including software architecture, interface design, information and data models, as well as any related standards and specifications.” (OGC Testbed-18 | OGC, 2022)

52°North participated in the task “Identifiers for Reproducible Science” of the “Future of Open Science and Building Energy Interoperability” thread. The task aimed to explore and develop best practices for reproducible scientific workflows in the field of Earth Observation. In addition, it proposed to investigate which standards are suitable to achieve reproducibility. 52°North selected a scientific study from one of its research partners as a demonstration use case. The study explores wilderness characteristics using explainable machine learning models. We used the Open Data Cube to index the AnthroProtect dataset, pygeoapi to make them available via OGC API Coverages and created STAC items to identify the data. Using Jupyter Notebooks, our team was able to visualize aspects of the trained model and predict the classification of a Sentinel-2 scene’s sensitive areas as either wild or anthropogenic. The workflow is available on the Whole Tale platform, which enables the reproduction of research results by executing tales – executable research objects that capture data, code and the software environment.

The goal of this series of projects is to identify, discuss and document the current and future requirements for the geodata infrastructure at the Julius Kühn Institute (JKI). Hence, 52°North supports the JKI in identifying a solution for managing geodata and creating the prerequisites for a short-term implementation of a federated research data infrastructure.

52°North has collected, discussed and documented the specific requirements for the spatial data infrastructure in a joint workshop with JKI staff from different teams and organizational units. The following technical aspects, among others, play an important role in the development of the solution approach:

• Dealing with large amounts of data
• Scalability
• Access control
• Metadata description
• Unifying endpoints and data access
• Version control
• Embedding geospatial data in web resources
• Integration into local infrastructure

In the follow-up projects, 52°North prototypically implemented different aspects of the GDI. The focus in 2022 was on the integration of raster data from a rasdaman instance into GeoNode v4.