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Agro-Geoinformatics with rasdaman

August 2017 – Increasingly, the advantage of combined spatial and temporal analysis is being recognized, and very much so currently in agroinformatics. Rasdaman is enabling novel agroinformatics services on many levels, and international conferences seek talks on rasdaman and its open-standard approach.

EOFarm is a hitech startup in Greece with a mission in supporting farmers with Big Data Analytics. The open-source rasdaman community platform has enabled a quick deployment of the service while ensuring its scalability and openness. Products offered include Color Composites, Band Ratios and Indices, Vegetation Detection, Canopy Greenness Estimation, Land Surface Temperature, Time series over arbitrary areas of interest, etc. With Landsat8, Sentinels, and !RapidEye the underlying data sets integrate both open and commercial satellite imagery. Due to the success of this service, meanwhile a similar framework has been deployed for water quality monitoring.

In Germany, Spatial Business Integration GmbH and rasdaman GmbH team up in the BigPicture project which focuses on “diagnosis in the field”: Big-Data-based determination of causes for satellite image derived and site-specific variations so that targeted measures can be recommended to farmers, such as fertilizer placement, application of plant protection products, choice of species to grow, etc. To achieve high reliability, 500 farmers are delivering ins-situ insight for ground truthing. Further, meteorological data are mixed in. Again, rasdaman is the enabling Big Datacube engine underneath. The project is being supported by the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

Meantime, the expertise of rasdaman CEO Peter Baumann in Big Datacubes is being sought continuously. In Kampala / Uganda this August he was invited keynote speaker at the Advances in Geomatics Research Conference where a central topic was how to best use Geo IT for an effective, yet environmentally compatible agriculture. Right after, he presented at the annual Agro-Geoinformatics Symposium at George Mason University in Fairfax, USA. At the INSPIRE conference in Kehl he will give a tutorial on INSPIRE WCS: from Mystery to Mastery, followed by talks at ESA EO Open Science Conference iN Frascati, Italy, and at INTERGEO Berlin, among others.

Contact: Dr. Peter Baumann, baumann@rasdaman.com