This activity aims at investigating use cases, applicable specifications and alternatives to current operational practices in Quality Control (QC) management, in order to properly address the technology needs for QC Metadata Management Systems in support of the new generation of Land Monitoring Services for the EEA (European Environmental Agency).

 

 

There is a specific requirement on the new land services focusing on continuous change monitoring. The current operational methods of land cover change detection are based on bi-temporal analysis for two points in time. These approaches are applied to 3 to 6 years mapping campaigns, while land cover changes occur continually. ;With this 3 to 6 year gap between inventories, all land change processes occurring in between are not captured. Full-fledged Land Cover Continuous Monitoring system of the land evolution is provided for EEA. ;The prototype products are demonstrated on number of sites, while full coverage (lt;6 million km2) is desired. The 30+ years of data in the Landsat archive together with high temporal resolution of Sentinel-2 comprise the most valuable dataset available for understanding land change overcoming a number of shortages.gt;

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This shift in use of EO images for land evaluation (i.e. from mapping to monitoring, from small to Big Data) results in inevitable requirement of dedicated Quality Control in automated processing of this Big Data. Each step of the Land Cover monitoring process generates number of quality assessment metadata to be stored evaluated and quantified for reporting along with the final products. The land products are typically delivered together with accuracy assessment table, while processing metadata is typically lost. As there is an increasing demand of quality assurance of the land services, the need of QC metadata management system is high, especially to assure consistency in continuous production.

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The QC Metadata Management System shall:

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Such system shall be open source and will require to design, develop and implement three main software components:

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The implementation shall draw from the OGC metadata standards for EO metadata catalogues (OGC 10-157r4, OGC 11-035r1 and ISO19139), respecting the principles of QA4EO (http://qa4eo.org) and CEOS accuracy assessment guidelines. The activity shall also submit required extensions or changes to relevant OGC specifications for metadata and/or discovery standards to OGC, and support the standardization process.='http:>

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