The EarthServer project has established the open access and therefore offers specialised analytics of multidimensional earth science databased on and extending the latest technologies of Array Databases.
The EarthServer project makes use of typical query expressions on a database to allow a client/server interface based on a “mix & match” access. This allows a barrier-free access to multidimensional data, from multiple sources, and without restrictions on the actual physical dimension. Also referred to as “Big Earth Data Analytics”, this system is based on the OGC WCPS open standards (also known as “XQuery on raster data”) and W3C XQuery. EarthServer combines these two technologies which results in a tight combination of data and its metadata. Moreover, the Rasdaman Array Database System has been extended with new types of spatial-temporal data coverage. On the server side supremely efficient optimizations, like the parallel and distributed processing of queries ensure the scalability of the requests to the size of Exabyte.
Six Lighthouse Applications, each equipped with 100+ TB of data, have demonstrated the viability of the applied approach. The knowledge has been returned at the end of the project in order to aid the advancement of the OGC standardisation process.
In the research and technology development activities, EarthServer has created a new open-source client and server technology that has been proven to be scalable to Exabyte, basing itself on distributed processing, supercomputing and cloud virtualization. Implementations are based on a server called Rasdaman big data analytics. Swing-it has been subcontractor in the fields of WP350 – Scalability and WP360 – Client.