One of our primary goals with the Geohazards Thematic Exploitation Platform (Geohazards TEP) is to connect users to information. We do so by organizing and managing contents and access protocols, and that’s what we performed for Sentinel-1 data access.
Let’s illustrate first the high end aspect of the discovery of Sentinel-1 data. We made it possible for users to start from an “event-based search” on the Platform.
This very simple way to query the Platform’s catalogue is based on the spatial and time extents of a selected feature, directly taken from the information layers accessible on the map. Let’s do this by using an event imported from the Disasters Charter activations. We shared a demo video, so you can see how GEP allows a user to perform a complete Sentinel-1 data discovery.
On the video, we see how a user can zoom into his region of interest, and visualise instantly a perimeter of recorded events, presented as a geometric feature, that will automatically refine itself into punctual events as the scale grows: as we start from Chile and dive into the Valaparaiso area, we are provided with the detailed events, up to the clickable items such as the 8.3 magnitude earthquake that struck central Chile in 16th September 2015.
A simple click on that event on the map provides us with an “info bubble” containing the recorded metadata of the event, plus the actionable metadata presented as a range of actionable links. The “Go to link” one will open the web page of the publication describing the details of the event, while the “Time filter” one will automatically query the catalogue by the date of the earthquake event, and similarly the “Spatial filter” one will automatically query the catalogue by the spatial coordinates of the event. Finally, the “Both filters” button will apply both the time and spatial extent of the selected event to the catalogue search, bringing to the users the acquired Sentinel-1 products that can be used to analyse the event.
Similarly to this ‘event driven’ discovery scenario, users on the Platform can also make use of the filters associated with previously generated products, that were shared on the Platform, and therefore they can retrieve exactly the sensor products involved in the generation of a given value-added product, such as Sentinel-1 data for the generation of InSAR interferograms.
So we have already here two very user-friendly ways to connect users to information. We did it by organizing and managing contents and access protocols, and you can also learn the “behind the scenes” aspects of it, on the Platform’s documentation pages (e.g. the developer getting started guide, and the reference on using GitHub for the Geohazards TEP) and from the many applications examples on the Geohazards TEP organization on GitHub, so that advanced users with software development skills can make use of it to create their own user interactions on a Portal application, or within a data processing application, both of which are expanding through community contributions to the Platform.