Beyond Google Earth: Surfing Petabyte Maps in the Future Internet

Tutorial 2
Beyond Google Earth: Surfing Petabyte Maps in the Future Internet
presentation available here

Sunday, September 28, AM

Presenter:
Peter Baumann I Jacobs University Bremen, DE

Since the launch of Google Earth at the latest it is clear that online services for multi-Terabyte satellite imagery are becoming integral part of our Internet experience. Actually, 2-D imagery is but the tip of the iceberg - the general concept of multi-dimensional spatio-temporal raster data covers 1-D sensor time series, 2-D imagery, 3-D CAT scans (x/y/t) and exploration data (x/y/z), 4-D climate, ocean, and cosmological simulation results as well as life science microarray data (x/y/z/t), and many more. The common data abstraction behind all these is that of a multidimensional array of some extent and cell (“pixel”, “voxel”) type. Sizes range well into multi- Terabyte object sizes, in future: multi-Petabyte. Today’s inexpensive high-capacity storage media indeed allow to give online access to such data. We face the appearance of navigational interfaces; the next step will consist of advancing from data stewardship to service stewardship based on open, flexible access interfaces for value-adding processing, analysis, and mining.

Examples are manifold: Sensor and streaming databases will allow ad-hoc summarization as well as standing queries for alerting. Hyperspectral satellite iamgery will not just be served as is, but derived products like vegetation index or snow index will be computed on the fly and without redundant storage. Human brain imaging will benefit from analysing thousands of brain activity maps simultaneously. Multi-Petabyte datacubes can be leveraged for online analysis. This poses new challenges on data management and, in particular, the design of open, interoperable services. 
In this tutorial we present the state of the art in semantic Web services for large-scale, multidimensional raster data. The tutorial will give an introduction to raster services, addressing modeling, architecture, optimization, and storage management. High emphasis will be devoted to applications in geo, life science, and the Grid; to this end, real-life use cases will be presented and discussed which stem from both projects carried out and our standardization work in the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC, www.opengeospatial.org).

Important Dates:
Tutorial Date: September 28, 2008
Time: 09:00 -13:00