GEP Community Survey on-line questionnaire

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Follow this link to go directly to the Community Survey online questionnaire:
https://surveyplanet.com/56c6dd1b9fb3285114352687

Today we are opening an online survey to involve more parties from research, industry, administration and government authorities in the evolution of the Geohazards Thematic Exploitation Platform (GEP) services.

GEP is an R&D activity developing a new ground segment operations approach, complementary to the traditional operations concept, and demonstrating the benefit of new technologies for large scale processing of EO data.

The platform is intended to support initially the global geohazards community’s objectives, as defined in the context of the International Forum on Satellite EO and Geohazards, organised by ESA and GEO in Santorini in 2012. In particular, GEP is a follow-on to the SuperSites Exploitation Platform (SSEP), an ESA initiative to support the Geohazards Supersites & Natural Laboratories initiative (GSNL) of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

GEP allows both on-demand processing for specific user needs and systematic processing to address common information needs of the geohazards community as a whole, as well as massive processing on multi-tenant computing resources on the Cloud. Such capacities will address the challenges of monitoring tectonic areas on a global basis, and of studying a range of geohazards. To exploit the geo-information generated using the Platform, GEP leverages open APIs for the integration of interactive processing and post-processing services.

The Platform follows a model for partnership and community building that is user driven. Fundamentally the current solution has been designed from working on user requirements from the GEO initiative on Geohazards Supersites and the CEOS Working Group on Disasters, with its Seismic Pilot involving a range of expert users such as for example the University of Leeds for UK’s COMET, ISTerre for the french Formater network, the italian Istituto Nazionale Geofisica & Vulcanologia, UNVACO, or NASA/JPL and University of Miami in the USA.

The evolution of the current platform into an operational service is following a capacity building process driving the requirements, design and implementation activities. This process includes a mechanism to gather user needs in liaison with the following types of organisation:

  • Geo-science community incl. Universities (PIs) worldwide;
  • Organisations with a national mandate concerning risk assessment (incl. seismological centres);
  • Specialists of geohazards risks in other sectors (pre-commercial research affecting insurance/reinsurance sector, civil engineering companies, energy, etc.);
  • National & regional civil protection agencies and national & local authorities with a risk management mandate (potentially for both prevention/preparedness and response).

This process allows the GEP consortium to design functionalities able to meet prioritized user needs in view of efficient and cost effective operations.

The programme of work covering the period 2016­-2017 will pursue activities with the Platform’s early adopters and will evolve the 16 processing applications currently available to exploit conventional and advanced InSAR processing for precise motion monitoring. The activity will develop six Pilot projects to demonstrate the potential of federated processing of EO data on the Cloud: a new pilot on photogrammetric processing using optical EO data with Univ. Strasbourg (France), the integration of optical based processing method for volcanic hazard monitoring with INGV (Italy), a pilot on terrain motion surveillance with CNR-­IREA (Italy), the systematic processing of Sentinel­-1 interferometric quick looks with DLR (Germany), the integration of a PSinSAR chain for precise terrain motion mapping with Altamira Information (Spain) and an exercise with the Corinth Rift Laboratory to test and exploit the platform processors and services to support geohazards science in this seismic part of Greece. In this course, the GEP will expand its overall user base to gradually reach a total of 60+ registered user applications in 2017.

This growing user community is a key aspect for the GEP consortium so we have created an online questionnaire to involve more parties from research, industry, administration and government authorities in the evolution of the platform’s services.

You have now the opportunity to contribute your needs and expectations in terms of functionality enhancements, use scenarios, services portfolio, data provisioning and concrete benefits for the GEP users.

The online survey is structured in 5 parts, and on average, it will take only 10 minutes to complete:

  • About you
  • Your thematic interests and current practices
  • You as a geohazards platform user
  • Your objectives with EO data [ incl. a branch for SAR experts ]
  • Finally, your vision of a research community platform

You can access the online survey by following this link: https://surveyplanet.com/56c6dd1b9fb3285114352687

It will be open from the 1st to 21st of March, 2016.

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