George Kakaletris

Big Data Analytics for Earth Sciences: the EarthServer approach

Big Data Analytics is an emerging field since massive storage and computing capabilities have been made available by advanced e-infrastructures. Earth and Environmental sciences are likely to benefit from Big Data Analytics techniques supporting the processing of the large number of Earth Observation datasets currently acquired and generated through observations and simulations. However, Earth Science data and applications present specificities in terms of relevance of the geospatial information, wide heterogeneity of data models and formats, and complexity of processing. Therefore, Big Earth Data Analytics requires specifically tailored techniques and tools. The EarthServer Big Earth Data Analytics engine offers a solution for coverage-type datasets, built around a high performance array database technology, and the adoption and enhancement of standards for service interaction (OGC WCS and WCPS). The EarthServer solution, led by the collection of requirements from scientific communities and international initiatives, provides a holistic approach that ranges from query languages and scalability up to mobile access and visualization. The result is demonstrated and validated through the development of lighthouse applications in the Marine, Geology, Atmospheric, Planetary and Cryospheric science domains.

Designing and Implementing an Open Infrastructure for Location-Based, Tourism-Related Content Delivery

The globally observed recession of mobile services market has pushed mobile network operators into looking for opportunities to provide value-added services on top of their high cost infrastructures. Latest advances in self and network-assisted positioning technologies, enable the provision of services that make use of the actual mobile user location. This paper presents the key points and considerations of a detailed approach for designing, developing and evaluating a very low-cost infrastructure, capable of providing tourism content related location-based services. The main effort is taken into allowing the potential integration of various market and technology stakeholders into such services, thus supporting open business models, while at the same time safeguarding end-user privacy.

A Distributed Infrastructure for Earth-Science Big Data Retrieval

Earth-Science data are composite, multi-dimensional and of significant size, and as such, continue to pose a number of ongoing problems regarding their management. With new and diverse information sources emerging as well as rates of generated data continuously increasing, a persistent challenge becomes more pressing: To make the information existing in multiple heterogeneous resources readily available. The widespread use of the XML data-exchange format has enabled the rapid accumulation of semi-structured metadata for Earth-Science data. In this paper, we exploit this popular use of XML and present the means for querying metadata emanating from multiple sources in a succinct and effective way. Thereby, we release the user from the very tedious and time consuming task of examining individual XML descriptions one by one. Our approach, termed Meta-Array Data Search (MAD Search), brings together diverse data sources while enhancing the user-friendliness of the underlying information sources. We gather metad...

Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Earth Science Through Datacube Analytics

With the unprecedented increase of orbital sensor, in situ measurement, and simulation data there is a rich, yet not leveraged potential for obtaining insights from dissecting datasets and rejoining them with other datasets. Obviously, goal is to allow users to “ask any question, any time, on any size”, thereby enabling them to “build their own product on the go”.

xWCPS: Bridging the Gap Between Array and Semi-structured Data

The ever growing amount of information collected by scientific instruments and the presence of descriptive metadata accompanying them calls for a unified way of querying over array and semi-structured data. We present xWCPS, a novel query language that bridges the path between these two different worlds, enhancing the expressiveness and user-friendliness of previous approaches.

A functionality perspective on digital library interoperability

Digital Library (DL) interoperability requires addressing a variety of issues associated with functionality. We report on the analysis and solutions identified by the Functionality Working Group of the DL.org project during its deliberations on DL interoperability. Ultimately, we hope that work based on our perspective will lead to improved architectures and software, as well as to greater interoperability, for next-generation DL systems.

Big Data in Agricultural and Food Research: Challenges and Opportunities of an Integrated Big Data E-infrastructure

Agricultural and food research are increasingly becoming fields where data acquisition, processing, and analytics play a major role in the provision and application of novel methods in the general context of agri-food practices. The chapter focuses on the presentation of an innovative, holistic e-infrastructure solution that aims to enable researches for distinct but interconnected domains to share data, algorithms and results in a scalable and efficient fashion. It furthermore discusses on the potentially significant impact that such infrastructures can have on agriculture and food management and policy making, by applying the proposed solution in variegating agri-food related domains.

Query Processing Over The Grid: The Role Of Workflow Management

gCube Information Retrieval Engine differentiates from federated search. Data and services are scattered over the infrastructure instead of being contained in confined sub-sections, made accessible via narrow interfaces. Grid, where gCube runs, is not meant for interactive work, but offers a vast pool of resources for processing large amounts of information. In such domain it comes as natural consequence the preference of machinery that can employ the afforementioned resources for offering a different range of services, over a traditional search fa-