Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University and director of rasdaman GmbH, has been honored with the Kenneth D. Gardels Award by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The OGC Board of Directors awarded the prize to Peter Baumann in recognition of his “significant contribution to the OGC’s essential role and mission in the global Information Technology community”.

Jeffrey K. Harris, Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, said: “We wish to express our deep appreciation for the extraordinary contribution you have made to the OGC community and to people around the world who are the ultimate beneficiaries of improvements in the development, management and use of geoscientific data. Devoting your time and bringing your dedication, expertise, critical thinking and leadership to OGC working groups has resulted in significant and enduring advances in technical standards.”

Peter Baumann has been closely working with the Open Geospatial Consortium for more than ten years. He is editor of twelve adopted standards around the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) suite of Big Geo Data standards. Recently he has been instrumental in establishing a new Big Data Domain Working Group with the OGC which he also co-chairs. As a consequence of this engagement, Peter Baumann has been invited by the European Spatial Data Infrastructure initiative, INSPIRE, as well as ISO to provide expertise in geo service and query language standardization.

Peter Baumann’s research focuses on large-scale scientific information services, in particular: massive multi-dimensional data cubes. He has architected the rasdaman (“raster data manager”) technology which in fact has pioneered a new research field, Array Databases. With rasdaman, spatio-temporal sensor, image, simulation, and statistics data of any size can be accessed and explored interactively through Array SQL which offers a “what you get is what you need” interface to scientists, engineers, and other data users.

About the Kenneth D. Gardels Award The Award is named after Kenneth D. Gardels, a Research Specialist at the Center for Environmental Design Research (University of California), who passed away in 1999 at the height of his career. It was conceived to memorialize the spirit of a man with a passion for making the world a better place through open communication and the use of geospatial information technology to improve the quality of human life.

About OGC The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international industry consortium of 473 companies, government agencies and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available interface standards. OGC® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services and mainstream IT. The standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible and useful with all kinds of applications. More info: www.opengeospatial.org

Multi-dimensional sensor, image, simulation output, and statistics data make up for most of the “Big Data” in science and engineering. Some weeks ago, it came to a decision to extend the SQL database language with massive multi-dimensional arrays. Initiated by Prof. Peter Baumann from Jacobs University, work has commenced on the forthcoming standard named SQL/MDA.

SQL has been tremendously successful in running any-size databases in business and administration. However, the “Big Data” in science are structured differently. Instead of simple tables, they often consist of multi-dimensional “data cubes”. In Geo sciences, for example, this encompasses 1-dimensional sensor data, 2-D satellite imagery, 3-D x/y/t image timeseries as well as x/y/z geophysical voxel data, and 4-D x/y/z/t weather data. In Life sciences, there is laserscan microscopy and brain scans. And it can grow as large as simulations of the whole universe when it comes to astrophysics.

But SQL is not able to find, filter, and process such arrays, and consequently today arrays largely are maintained outside databases. Recognizing this shortcoming, Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University Bremen, and his group have long been researching on ways to extend SQL appropriately. The rasdaman system which the group has established effectively has coined a new technology, Array Databases. In a recent technology demonstration, more than 1,000 computers have collaborated in a cloud to jointly compute the result of one single database query. This “distributed query processing” means a massive speedup, and research challenges on multi-Petabyte data cubes can be answered that hitherto were unsolvable.

Meantime, international data centers use this tool to allow scientists gain unanticipated insights into their spatio-temporal data cubes, and rasdaman installations can be found at NASA, ESA, British Geological Survey, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, Deutscher Wetterdienst, and many more.

In Beijing all national bodies participating in the SQL working group of ISO unanimously have agreed on the importance of arrays in SQL. Following thorough assessment of all options available, the group has accepted the proposal of Baumann for further elaboration. The new standard will be named ISO 9075 SQL/MDA, for “Multi-Dimensional Arrays”.

PublicaMundi, being a research project working to make big open geospatial data easier to share, discover, and reuse, is really excited for the European Commission’s (EC) first official strategy to promote the data-driven economy in the EU!

In July 2014, the EC outlined a new strategy on Big Data, supporting and accelerating the transition towards a data-driven economy in Europe. The data-driven economy will stimulate research and innovation on data while leading to more business opportunities and an increased availability of knowledge and capital, in particular for SMEs, across Europe. The EC adopted the Communication on the data-driven economy as a response to the European Council’s conclusions of October 2013, which focused on the digital economy, innovation and services as drivers for growth and jobs and called for EU action to provide the right framework conditions for a single market for big data and cloud computing.

The EC urges governments to embrace potential of Big Data! In the words of EC Vice-President Neelie Kroes:

It’s about time we focus on the positive aspects of big data. Big data sounds negative and scary, and for the most part it isn’t. Leaders need to embrace big data.

These are exciting times for all researchers and SMEs working in the forefront of the Data Economy! As a project, we are really looking forward to helping the EC, EU member states and SMEs to capitalize on our research and innovation results.

For more information, please check the following:

• Text of the Communication and Staff Working Document, the Press Release and Memo

• The EU strategy on the data-driven economy

• What big data can do for you?

• Helping SMEs fish the Big Data ocean

The first PublicaMundi GeoDataCamp took place this Friday 30th May 2014 in Athens, right in the heart of our growing innovation and open community, InnovAthens. The IMIS team, along with our colleagues from GET and rasdaman welcomed all participants, wondered a bit around the excellent facilities, and got straight to work!

InnovAthens, our new home for innovation and creativity

First impression from inside InnovAthens: the NX-01 Enterprise!

Spiros Athanasiou, our Project Coordinator, presented the motivation, ideas, and ambition of PublicaMundi. Our goal of makingopen geospatial data easier to publish, view, and reuse, resonated to all participants and for various reasons. Almost everyone had a story to share: how difficult they find to search for geospatial data and transform them from formats they are not aware of, how cumbersome it is to produce metadata (especially INSPIRE), how much they appreciate a scalable mapping framework, or even how hard it is to convince others for the value of open data.

Spiros (passionately) presenting our motivation and ambition

Angelos Tzotsos, our Scientific and Technical Coordinator took the floor, and presented all technologies, standards and open source software which are developed, extended and integrated by PublicaMundi. Angelos stressed the fact that the PublicaMundi originates from active members of the open source and open data communities, working under the open knowledge principles. Our architecture rather impressed the audience, both for its completeness, but also for its versatility. Most participants identified a piece of software they already use, but also discovered new open source software that suits their needs!

After this round of introductions we had our break-out sessions. Our participants were divided into two teams, developers and data publishers. It was great to see that developers were the majority!

One of the many one-to-one sessions with data publishers

The data publishers were treated to a focused demonstration and training session of our data publishing workflow: starting from creating their publishing organization, assigning users, and then creating metadata step-by-step. The feedback we received was quite interesting and useful. Publishers requested automatic validation of INSPIRE-compatible metadata, automation (where possible) in creating metadata based on the actual data, and automatic harvesting from any data repositories and spatial databases they have in place. These features were all planned (some also implemented in our lab), but it was nice to affirm our original goal-setting.

Developers undergoing a crash course on PublicaMundi technologies

Angelos using Lenna to demonstrate a basic rasdaman scenario

The developersunderwent a barrage of technical demonstrations, code snippets and use cases. We kicked things off with our Mapping API, moved on with our proposed Data API and its syntax, and went under the hood to show how these combine and abstract the open OGC services, databases, analysis engines and map servers. It was really exhausting for everyone, since we covered all technical aspects of how PublicaMundi works, but the whole experience was extremely rewarding. Besides specialized technical feedback, there was a consensus from our developers: KISS-it even more! So we plan on making our APIs even easier to use even for developers that only know what coordinates are.

After the break-out sessions ended everyone got back together to have an open discussion. Developers were exchanging ideas with data publishers, stating their needs and difficulties. Data publishers explained that their work (as-is) is quite difficult, since they lack the tools and workflows to improve the way they publish open geospatial data. And both of them turned to us for solutions. Well, we will certainly do our best!

Closing the event, Spiros welcomed everyone to participate as early testers in the upcoming invitational beta of PublicaMundi. It seems that not only will we have many beta testers, but also currently unpublished open geospatial data to use! We renewed our appointment after the summer (so more GeoDataCamps will be organized due to increased interest) and then wandered theAthens Technopolis and its 13th Jazz Festival for some good tunes, a cold beer, and (the compulsory) souvlaki.

A big thank you goes to everyone that participated in GeoDataCamp and honored us with their presence and feedback! Also, our sincere appreciation goes to InnovAthens and the helpful staff, for their warm welcome and incredible facilities. We will certainly be back!

All the presentations of the PublicaMundi GeoDataCamp are available here.

As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, ideas, or want to join us, just drop us a line.