Through our well-established expertise in the field of Space data access infrastructure and Web services architecture, SPACEBEL contributes to standards and specifications related to Earth observation data systems in order to make location information FAIR, i.e. Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

Our latest contribution entitled EO Collection Metadata GeoJSON(-LD) Encoding (OGC 17-084) has recently been approved as OGC best practice following our presentation to the OGC Technical Committee at the Closing Plenary in Ottawa on March 5th 2020. The paper provides document models for the exchange of information describing Earth observation collections – both within and between different organisations. An EO collection or dataset series corresponds to a series of EO datasets also called EO products derived from data obtained from an instrument on-board a single satellite or acquired from several payloads, possibly from various satellite platforms, working in the same instrument mode. Dataset series are grouped according to specific criteria such as resolution, product quality, … (e.g. snow collections, cloud-free collections, …).

Last year, our OpenSearch for Earth Observation candidate suite of standards contributions were also approved by OGC: OGC EO Dataset Metadata GeoJSON(-LD) Encoding Standard and OGC OpenSearch-EO GeoJSON(-LD) Response Encoding Standard. OGC has published a blog post putting these efforts in context, which is available here.

Moreover, several Engineering Reports of SPACEBEL have been published by OGC, amongst other OGC Testbed-15: Catalogue and Discovery Engineering Report.

We also produce videos for past Open Geospatial Consortium Testbed and Pilot activities which are available on the Internet. Some examples: OGC Testbed 13, OGC Testbed 14.

All these acknowledgements confirm our role as a major player in the harmonisation and standardisation process of Earth observation ground segment interfaces for the benefit of European citizens.