Last Thursday I was in Valencia at the BDVA Summit 2016. Florin Serban (BDVA/Terrasigna) had organised a session on big data and space which proved very popular. It was standing room only as we presented our views on how access to EO data, and particularly that coming from Copernicus, will change in the next few years.

ESA (Gunther LandgraffLandgraf), DG GROW (Martina Sindelar), DG-RTD (Gilles Ollier) and I each gave presentations on our perspective for future actions linked to the development of EO exploitation platforms and links to Copernicus. I presented the MAEOS study we are conducting into an EO Services Marketplace and we had some discussions around how to link together all the various initiatives.

What really struck me is how much progress has been made to align all these efforts. It is as if a strategy is evolving bottom-up! - just the opposite if how it is supposed to develop. We see common elements coming into each of our perspectives including a basic 3 tier model for the overall picture and a much more detailed 5 tier model which describes the supply chain and now also recognises the research use of the data and information (see my presentation from the BDVA summit).

Mostly, this is being driven by the EC willingness to invest in the new Data and Information Service (DIAS) for Copernicus. We have argued for some years that action is needed to open-up the data for industrial use at the European level and to avoid that this became the privilege of a few Member States; DIAS will hopefully achieve this.

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