Digital Earth South Africa
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
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Digital signalOpen setCubeGoodness of fitSpacetime
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SpacetimeIntegrated development environmentSoftware frameworkMilitary operationSatelliteState of matterSatelliteForm (programming)Distribution (mathematics)SpacetimeComputer animation
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Dean numberData managementIntegrated development environmentExecution unitSoftware developerIntegrated development environmentFocus (optics)State observerData miningWater vaporCore dumpAdditionService (economics)TelecommunicationComputing platformSpacetimeSatelliteAreaLatent heatTouch typingMultiplication signPoint (geometry)Order (biology)Mathematical analysisKey (cryptography)MappingLevel (video gaming)Slide ruleTerm (mathematics)Data managementNumberComplex (psychology)Group actionComputer animation
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Case moddingElectric currentSatelliteComputer-generated imageryLibrary catalogLibrary catalogSatelliteLatent heatState observerLimit (category theory)Band matrixSet (mathematics)Multiplication signFile Transfer ProtocolConstraint (mathematics)Hard disk driveMedical imagingComputer animation
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PlanningService (economics)Series (mathematics)Mathematical analysisSpeciesDenial-of-service attackArc (geometry)Frame problemFormal grammarProjective planeLatent heatProcess (computing)Observational studyPower (physics)Data storage deviceProduct (business)Service (economics)Limit (category theory)Cartesian coordinate systemTouchscreenMultiplication signAreaFocus (optics)WebsiteTime seriesComputer animation
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Digital signalTerm (mathematics)Newton's law of universal gravitationDigitizingAddress spaceProduct (business)State observerCubeTerm (mathematics)Open setGame theorySet (mathematics)Scaling (geometry)Mobile appComputing platformComputer animation
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SatelliteImage resolutionRegular graphPlanningMehrplatzsystemImage resolutionService (economics)Channel capacitySet (mathematics)Level (video gaming)DigitizingMedical imagingCubeMIDIPerspective (visual)Computer animation
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CubeDigital signalOpen setSuite (music)Motion blurSimultaneous localization and mappingElectronic mailing listUsabilityChannel capacityLocal ringPhysical systemData storage deviceFile archiverLevel (video gaming)MereologyService (economics)Order (biology)Sampling (statistics)Process (computing)DigitizingCubeSoftware testingMathematical analysisLaptopOpen setTouchscreenCollaborationismFile formatTerm (mathematics)Computing platformSubject indexingComputer animation
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Visualization (computer graphics)Open setCubeSatelliteService (economics)Product (business)Series (mathematics)DisintegrationMathematical analysisInformationSource codeDigital signalMaxima and minimaState observerVisualization (computer graphics)Hand fanCubeVirtual realitySatelliteSpacetimeINTEGRALComputing platformMultitier architectureComputer animation
10:33
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, my name is Andi Samlisa and I'm with the South African National Space Agency and I will share with you today the work that we've been doing towards building digital at South Africa using the open data cube.
00:21
The mandate of the space agency, we can articulate it into three forms, acquisition to distribution of satellite data, the preservation of the satellite data and thirdly and most importantly is the useful usage of that satellite data for what we now call the capable state. The usefulness of the satellite data is determined from the core by the user requirements and
00:44
in this aspect we had embarked earlier on on engaging with all of our government departments from revenue services to communications and to our traditional departments around environmental management, be it with your water or the mining sector.
01:01
The idea behind these engagements was to solicit the key pain points that government had in order for government to deliver services to the citizens. We know of course that as time progresses, government re-articulates its priority areas and so we're also constantly looking at how the sensor priority areas that were informed
01:24
by those engagements align with the priorities of government, as you can see in some of the mappings all the way to the sustainable development goals. My slide doesn't show where we've actually done the mapping to the Agenda 2063. What is important is that at an observation requirements analysis level, we found that
01:46
through the time these do not change so much because I guess because of the complexity and also the improvements in the technology, the way that these two align in terms of how we've been delivering on this.
02:02
To update our observation requirements, we now follow a number of listening posts. One of those listening posts is using our local chapter of the Group on Earth Observation, which is our SAGO, to keep in touch with the users that these priority areas are still relevant and the detailed observation requirements which then inform our sensor specification
02:25
are what the community is still requiring. In addition to the SAGO platform, we also use our annual conference on space for national development, which has three tiers into it. One we look at engagement with the director-generals from all of the government and the CEOs
02:43
of the government entities. And secondly, we look at practitioners and the researchers, as you would know, that's normally the biggest participation. And then there's the industry focus because we do have the mandate for industry development and we realise that as a government entity, we cannot actually get to realise the value
03:03
of space without our partnerships with industry, which you will also see in how we're implementing digital at South Africa. From observation requirements to satellite specification, one of the major things we look at is how do we then meet those specifications.
03:21
South Africa does have a capability for building satellites, however, due to budget constraints and also the diversity of the requirements, we mainly push through using available data sets from all over the world, and these come from the publicly owned satellites to
03:43
privately owned or commercial data sets. Currently, our catalogue has over a million satellite images and it's growing daily. One of the major questions that, of course, we had is how do we make all of this data timely accessible to our users? Currently, we use the FTP sites, which have the limitation that not everyone has
04:04
appropriate bandwidth access and to make sure that we reach every corner of the country, we then use hard drives to deliver the data. Even with these limitations, we have found very broad application of Earth Observations
04:24
data throughout our government and its entities, and some of the examples of those are shown on screen. But some of the limitations that we're still faced with is that activities are more project-based rather than being operational services, and we are limited in geographical coverage processing.
04:44
So because of the storage and processing power that's required, you find that people are doing small projects around specific geographic areas and very few products are counter-wide focusing. It also brings the limitation around the time service analysis, especially when we're looking at
05:03
monitoring drought and climate change related impacts. Of course, from a scientific side, the update of our methodologies also gets impacted by this. To our excitement with Geosciences Australia putting out Digital Earth Australia and the following app of
05:27
Digital Earth Africa, we started to see that actually we can actually address these challenges using the Open Data Cube platform for it. So with Digital Earth Africa, the landscape has truly changed in the continent.
05:46
It's absolutely what I would call a game changer, not only for the products that it will be giving, but also for driving innovation in a scale that is unforeseen within the Earth observation sector in the continent. Now, the two data sets that Digital Earth Africa had aimed in terms of the census,
06:04
and to start with was Sentinel and Landsat. From a national perspective, we had made a huge investment in commercial data set, high resolution data set. So to sort of like have a bottom-up approach to what Digital Earth Africa was doing,
06:21
we thought why don't we start with a high resolution data set, whilst Digital Earth Africa is looking at your mid-resolution data sets and build the capacity and the knowledge at a local level around the data cubes, but providing a complementary data service to the users
06:41
than that which was being provided by Digital Earth Africa. And here we looked at the investment we made in the sport imagery over 13 years of investment in that sensor.
07:01
So this led us to starting what we now call Digital Earth South Africa, and here we started, of course, with looking at our existing infrastructure, because you can imagine over the years the terabytes of the data that we've been storing the spot on.
07:25
We now needed to make sure that all of that data comes online, and then also the processing capabilities and also the servicing that we would have to provide to our users in order for them to access the data. So practical level, first and foremost, we looked at the infrastructure,
07:43
whilst another part of the team was looking at the readiness of the data and extracting all of that data back out of the archives and also from the sport system itself. Then we looked at how we're going to get this data to analysis already.
08:00
We know that USGS has been working on Landsat and ESA has been working on Sentinel, so we then went and partnered with Catalyst for the ARD for sport. We also, with the storage, partnered with NRF Sarawo and on the open data cube installation and so forth itself,
08:23
partnered with one of our local industry partners, Cartoza. So this has been a major learning experience for us. One of the key maybe I can mention in this platform would be the move from ingesting the data in the data cube, rather going for indexing the data from the data tube,
08:43
the move away from the EO to EO3 format. And one of the things that we found very useful in terms of team collaboration is the JupyterHub, and we've built on the Jupyter notebooks that Digital Earth Africa had put in place as the simple notebooks.
09:01
What you see on screen is a testing of the whole process, but now you find that Digital Earth Africa encourages in one being able to run the NDVI on the fly on the simple data. Earth Observations on the Edge, for me, talks to these three tiers.
09:24
The institutional improvements that Digital Earth South Africa will be providing for us, and not only on ensuring that we meet our mandate of protection and preservation of satellite imagery, but also that we can drive the notion of data being a national asset
09:41
and therefore appropriate investments being made on that, and also the whole concept around shared data infrastructure. The user co-created value is something that I am looking forward to see how it actually explodes, where near real-time solutions can start being put in place, and also the integration of data and GIS tools
10:04
within the data cube platform, but most importantly is driving the usage of this data and creating the excitement around Earth observations, and this is where visualisation and virtual reality tools could come into play.
10:20
The experience that our Deputy Minister had in Canberra when Digital Earth Africa had the virtual reality, still today means that he is a fan and a big supporter of space in the country. Thank you very much.