Earth Observation, Open Science and Innovation

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Over the past decades, rapid developments in digital and sensing technologies, such as the Cloud, Web and Internet of Things, have dramatically changed the way we live and work. The digital transformation is revolutionizing our ability to monitor our planet and transforming the way we access, process and exploit Earth Observation data from satellites.

This book reviews these megatrends and their implications for the Earth Observation community as well as the wider data economy. It provides insight into new paradigms of Open Science and Innovation applied to space data, which are characterized by openness, access to large volume of complex data, wide availability of new community tools, new techniques for big data analytics such as Artificial Intelligence, unprecedented level of computing power, and new types of collaboration among researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and citizen scientists. In addition, this book aims to provide readers with some reflections on the future of Earth Observation, highlighting through a series of use cases not just the new opportunities created by the New Space revolution, but also the new challenges that must be addressed in order to make the most of the large volume of complex and diverse data delivered by the new generation of satellites.

Christoph Aubrecht is affiliated with the European Space Agency (ESA), representing ESA at the World Bank to coordinate collaborative activities. Prior to joining ESA, Chris was leading the spatial analytics efforts under the World Bank’s Central America & Caribbean CDRP initiative. For more than 10 years Chris also worked at the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), most recently serving as senior advisor on geospatial strategy development and implementation design.

Further previous positions include senior specialist consultancies at the World Bank's DRM and Urban unit, short-term consultancy at GFDRR, foreign national research affiliation at NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center, and visiting scientist positions at Columbia University's CIESIN and the attached NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center as well as at the University of Southern California. From 2008-2015 Chris served as adjunct lecturer in GI science and remote sensing at University of Vienna.

Chris holds a PhD in integrated GI science and remote sensing from Vienna University of Technology and a prior Master's degree in geography and GI science from the University of Vienna.

Pierre-Philippe Mathieu is Earth Observation Data Scientist at the European Space Agency in ESRIN (Frascati, Italy). He spent 20+ years working in the field of environmental and ocean modelling, weather risk management and remote sensing. He has a degree in mechanical engineering and M.Sc from University of Liege (Belgium), a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Louvain (Belgium), and a Management degree from the University of Reading Business School (UK).