Background

Copernicus is the European Union's Earth Observation (EO) programme, which aims to look at our planet and its environment and improve the quality of life for European citizens. It provides a vast amount of data from satellites and in-situ sensors which include networks of ground-based, airborne, and seaborne measurement systems. Copernicus services benefit urban area management, sustainable development and nature protection, regional and local planning, agriculture, forestry and fisheries, health, emergency response and many more. It is estimated that the amount of EO data gathered by Copernicus is about 12 terabytes per day and is growing continuously. However, only less than 5% of the data gathered by Copernicus is actually analysed by human analysts nowadays. Big Data technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods are required to analyse and manage the data produced by Copernicus, and also to do this in an efficient, sustainable way. Solving the Big Data management challenges of the integration, processing and analysis of Copernicus data with other industrial data sources will open up new market avenues and strengthen European leadership in EO applications and technologies.

Key Project

“CENTURION: Copernicus datacube and AI services for society, industry and new market generation” is a 36-month research and innovation project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme contract number 101004311. CENTURION aims to address major challenges in EO, and Copernicus Big Data management by integrating ground-breaking spatio-temporal datacubes and automated AI as a Service Platform that can be used by end-users for a wide range of applications in a variety of areas. To achieve its aims, CENTURION activities include the development and assessment of novel software and data processing technologies according to end-users requirements, validation of the developed platform in the real use cases, dissemination of the results, standardization of the methodology, and paves the way for broad commercial exploitation. CENTURION will validate the project objectives in a specific, tailored set of 5 realistic use cases. However, these large-scale use cases represent only a very small subset of all possible applications that the CENTURION platform will be able to serve in the future. CENTURION will cover many other domains, including (but not limited to) environment, maritime safety and marine ecology applications, in-land water management, disaster mitigation, security and defence.

The CENTURION consortium is an ambitious, multidisciplinary group of 10 experienced partners from 7 EU countries, who have the complementary skills and history of productive research and industry collaborations that are needed to successfully achieve the project's goals. The CENTURION consortium is a strategically balanced mix of hi-tech SMEs (OPT/NET BV, rasdaman GmbH) as technology providers teaming up with further SMEs (Inlecom Group, Crowdhelix), universities (Jacobs University, Bucharest Polytechnic), one of the Copernicus DIASes (CloudFerro CREODIAS), research centres (Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Julius Kühn Institute), and IT industry (SLTN). The key skill areas and expertise represented by the individual members include Copernicus satellite data pre-processing, fusion and analysis, supervised and unsupervised machine learning AI, agriculture, forestry, IPR, standardisation, ecosystem development, cloud platforms and large scale ICT service delivery.

Earth Data Helix

The Earth Data Helix is an international Open Innovation community of specialists in the area of space, geodata, EO industry services, Big Data technologies, AI, and related disciplines. The Helix was launched to accelerate commercial dissemination and the wider impact of CENTURION on science and technology, the European economy and its citizens, The Earth Data Helix supports the CENTURION project's ambition to open new EO market venues by lowering the barriers to entry and effort required from the market players to develop new and innovative services for the benefit of Europe’s citizens.