52°North Spatial Information Research GmbH

Risk, Uncertainty and Insurance under Climate Change

Visualization and implementation of web applications for the RUINS project

The Technische Universität Braunschweig and University of Freiburg commissioned 52°North as a subcontractor to support the BMBF funded research project RUINS (Risk, Uncertainty and Insurance under Climate Change. Coastal Land Management on the German North Sea). The RUINS project addresses risk and uncertainty under climate change. It includes the public and decision makers in different regions along the German North Sea coast. In order to support the communication with the public, the project designed and implemented web applications to better assess and communicate the associated risks.

52°North contributes experience with and knowledge about uncertainty modelling and visualization as well as implementation of web applications. This led to our prototypical implementation, which the RUINS consortium adopted and adapted. Furthermore, we set up a web application-based survey to assess the risk propensity of citizens in the study regions.

Universität Freiburg, Germany

Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany

Copernicus Data Infrastructure at IT.NRW

Efficient processing of Copernicus satellite and in situ data

One of the core tasks of the State Office for Information Technology and Statistics (IT.NRW) is to develop and operate the IT infrastructure for the North Rhine-Westphalian (NRW) state administration. The state office also advises and supports the state authorities and institutions in the use of information technology. As a provider of infrastructure, geospatial data and services, IT.NRW plays an important role in the spatial data infrastructure in NRW. One of IT.NRW’s goals is to further develop its own infrastructure to better support on-demand processing of very large amounts of data for creating information products in the context of Copernicus. This development takes place in joint pilot projects with the state administration stakeholders, such as the competence centers for remote sensing of the LANUV NRW, Geobasis NRW or Wald und Holz NRW. IT.NRW applies an agile process to develop structures and answer questions that contribute to the sustainable development of an efficient Copernicus data infrastructure for the NRW state administration.

After the successful realization of a first pilot project supporting the use case of detection and qualification of orchards in NRW, IT.NRW continued to improve the stability and scalability of the Kubernetes-based infrastructure. The consortium, in close collaboration with IT.NRW, replaced the central workflow execution component with a workflow engine based on the Argo framework. This pilot project was driven by Geobasis NRW requirements. Fully integrated with Kubernetes, Argo enables the scalable and reliable execution of complex workflows using process steps capsulated in Docker containers. A dedicated focus was on the management of metadata on Copernicus raw data as well as on process results in a central metadata index.

In close collaboration with con terra and IT.NRW, 52°North designed the system architecture. We focused on the transition of existing workflows to Argo and the integration of the newly introduced metadata index. In addition, our team supported the deployment and setup of the new software solution on IT.NRW premises.

In order to reflect and sustainably integrate the requirements of IT.NRW and the related competence centers, our team held a dedicated workshop to identify the most important aspects of the platform. We concurrently improved the architecture design based on insights gained and developed first system components. Due to the short project life, we established an agile feedback process with bi-weekly Jour Fixe meetings. This ensured the efficient and focused realization of the workflow system that is now capable of processing large amounts of Sentinel data using modern elastic scalability approaches.

con terra GmbH (main contractor), Germany

EFTAS, Germany

NRT Platform for Copernicus Sentinel Data

Near-real time processing concepts for Copernicus Sentinel-1 data

As a technical progression of SenSituMon project developments (page 36), the EOPORT project developed and tested innovative methods and technologies for generating near real-time (NRT) information products for large-scale monitoring of flood areas based on satellite and in situ sensor data. EOPORT partners, part of a bigger consortium led by Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), should use the results to develop and market operational services in the context of the NRT Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite missions – in particular Sentinel-1 data.

Insurance companies depend on up-to-date information about the location, intensity and duration of floods for a quick response to flood-related damage events. This information is valuable for the assessment of flood risks. Thus, the resulting information products are generated to accommodate these companies’ requirements. The project carried out data analysis in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

52°North collaborated with con terra and EFTAS on the development and operation of the processing system on a dedicated tenant in the Open Telekom Cloud (OTC). This acts as a proof of concept for external EOPORT NRT platform users. We also realized a Kubernetes-based job execution concept to enable efficient processing of NRT Sentinel-1 data provided as small bursts. Our team was responsible for the sustainable and scalable operation of the different components (e.g., Kafka, Spark-based image processing).

Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT), Norway

Kongsberg Spacetec AS (KSPT), Norway

T-Systems, Germany

con terra GmbH, Germany

EFTAS, Germany

Fraym Data Management Platform

Designing geodata management

Fraym “delivers unprecedented, localized information about population characteristics and behaviors” (Fraym | Advanced data on communities around the world, n.d.). The data used ranges from raster and vector data to survey and related reference data.This data and the results of analysis workflows must be stored and managed in a sustainable and similar manner. Since the amount of data Fraym stores exceeded a manually manageable threshold, they needed to create a modern and scalable solution that takes Geo-IT standards into account. The main project goal was to identify, discuss and document the requirements for Fraym’s Data Management Platform (DMP) with a particular focus on geo-spatial aspects. 52°North supported and advised Fraym in their development of solutions for storing and managing geo-spatial data required for data analysis workflows.

The initial requirements analysis phase featured a remote User Story Workshop. Based on the user requirements collected at the workshop, 52°North designed an overall architecture for the DMP. Using arc42 as a lightweight, but flexible architecture documentation concept, we identified and designed the DMP’s central components to the required level of detail.

The project finalized the implementation phase in 2021. 52°North developed the DMP using cutting-edge technology (e.g. AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, auto-scaling of underlying business logic components, S3 for data storage). We realized specific solutions that focus on the requirements of data ingestion and metadata management on top of the existing GeoNode and Django framework. A special focus was on the extensibility of the ingestion and metadata framework to enable lightweight adjustments by Fraym staff. Raster data is stored and managed in S3 buckets while vector data is hosted in a PostGIS data based and exposed via GeoServer.

Fraym, USA