The amount of satellite data available to Ireland is growing fast but it can be hard to find. A new Irish initiative aims to change that. Photograph: The Irish TimesAs we sleep, work or play, thousands of satellites overhead are busy gathering data on the Earth below. A University College Dublin-led research consortium is aiming to make it easier for non-specialists to access this Earth observation data and to establish Ireland as a leader in the EO-based industry.
“It’s difficult to find the relevant data because the amount of available data is huge and often stored in different places,” she says. “Finding the relevant data is already a challenge in itself; for non-specialist users, it is a big barrier.” UCD is a logical place for Cameo to be based given it is a hub for Irish space-related research. There is the UCD Centre for Space Research, which is developing Ireland’s first home-grown satellite EIRSAT-1, while many researchers on campus are using EO data.
“Earth observation is now at the heart of precision agriculture, catchment management, emissions control, site location planning, sustainability assessment, supply chain logistics and value chain design,” says Holden. “They have their own data sets,” says Bertolotto. “But there is no common platform or entry that will direct you to the different places where data sets are stored. SMEs might not have the experience or realise the potential of the data out there to help them with their problems or in their day-to-day business.”
“We want to quickly get them the data on their farm [and] show them what they need to know through a really simple to use interface. One area that we’re looking at is natural language processing. For example, the farmer, or end-user, could type in what they are interested in, in natural text, and the system could pull out and recommend data through the data discovery platform.”