The Open Data Cube in a Box

The OpenDataCube (ODC) is a collaborative effort to develop software and a community of users around a common goal of making it easier to access and analyse earth observation satellite data. Due to a 50% increase in the number of Earth observing satellites over the past 12 months, coupled with new storage formats, like Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF and associated tools, there is a need for a standard way to ‘plug in’ to this data and enable analysis processes. The ODC was developed in the Australian Federal Government as a means to access and analyse satellite data and has rapidly expanded across the world. ODC has been adopted by many organisations, including USGS and NASA in the US, the Satellite Applications Catapult in the UK and CSIRO and Geoscience Australia in Australia. There are now serious discussions to deploy ODC in over 20 countries around the world, with 7 production or demonstration installations already in use, and that number grows each year.

One of the hurdles to ODC adoption is in the first step, getting the application installed and loading data. While it is open source, and freely available on GitHub, it is a complex application. Learning how to set it up with the required database (Postgres) and data indexing (in place data discovery) or ingestion (importing data and optimising it) can take a significant investment of time. Cube in a Box has been developed to lower the barriers to entry for newcomers, to flatten the learning curve. Cube in a Box utilises Docker, Docker Compose and cloud infrastructure templates to enable a local test environment or cloud deployment to be configured over an area of interest as simply as possible. In this way, a new user to the ODC can get up and running in hours instead of days. This means that more people can work with earth observation data than ever before.

This presentation will briefly introduce the ODC project and will then discuss the Cube in a Box methodology and technology, before demonstrating a number of examples of use of the Cube in a Box. Finally, we'll discuss what’s next for the ODC project.

Presentation type: Full length
Session: Remote Sensing

Presenter

Alex Leith

Alex is a certified spatial professional with extensive experience in software development, DevOps and project management. Alex has spent time volunteering for GovHack and GeoRabble and is one of a handful of GeoHipster interviewers, which means he is in touch with a broad community of hip geo-folk. When not writing code, or at least talking to people about writing code, he likes a great craft beer (currently seeking out the best XPA) or whisky (Islay preferably). Alex manages technical projects at FrontierSI, ensuring that the tech and governance people are communicating, and strives to ensure that projects deliver useful tools and the best outcomes.