The Copernicus App Lab aims at bridging the digital divide between the established, science-driven Earth observation community and the young, innovative, entrepreneurial world of mobile developers by establishing of a proof-of-concept for providing the data from the Copernicus Land, Marine Environment and Atmosphere Monitoring Services as Linked Open Data (LOD) for take-up of EO data in mobile applications. The experiences of the consortium as key technology provider in various international competition events, such as the Copernicus Masters, shows that easy access to data is crucial for the success of EO business development. Main benefits: - Empowering the uptake of Copernicus Services in the mobile developer community by offering a one-stop-shop for mobile developers who wish to integrate Copernicus data into their value-added services via the tools needed and in the format known by mobile developers. - Improving data utilization by publishing value-added products from Copernicus data and services as Linked Open Data finally leading to better and more numerous mobile Copernicus apps. - Trigger business opportunities along the value added chain of EO data and services by providing tools for publishing and interlinking EO data, for querying EO data and for visualizing EO data. - Engaging the user community by setting a strong focus on dissemination activities and by collecting user feedback during a virtual beta testing phase and direct exchange with mobile developers during an ESA Space App Camp.

Flooding is a rapidly growing concern in West Africa, projected to increase with climate change. It is both a threat and a blessing for human lives, agriculture and infrastructure. There is a great need for reliable access to operational flood forecasts and alerts produced by a robust information and communication technology (ICT) system adapted to regional conditions and operated by capable West African institutions. More than six years of cooperation between FANFAR participants have identified user needs and co-developed technologies and capacities aimed at meeting them. As a result, several ICT components of the desired system are already available, including input data streams, a hydrological model, a cloud computing platform, and a communication channel. However, they have not yet been fully integrated or adapted to the conditions and needs in West Africa (e.g. unreliable electricity and internet). Some components are already used by key West African institutions. However, e.g. human and financial capacity is still limiting uptake. The aim of FANFAR is to reinforce the cooperation between West African and European hydrologists, ICT experts, decision analysts, and end-user communities to provide a co-designed, co-adapted, integrated, and co-operated streamflow forecasting and alert pilot system for West Africa. End-users will participate in regular workshops and virtual meetings aiming to demonstrate the ICT, define user needs, co-design necessary adaptations, and develop capacity. Through this incremental refinement process, our existing ICT will be fully integrated and adapted to West African conditions. The system will be operated, supported and tested in practical flood management by regional, national and local institutions. Social science frameworks will be employed to aid development decisions, analyze behavioural responses, and understand technology adoption processes aiming to facilitate sustainable uptake of the system in the region.

The main objective of BETTER is to implement an EO Big Data intermediate service layer devoted to harnessing the potential of the Copernicus and Sentinel European EO data directly from the needs of the users. BETTER aims to go beyond the implementation of generic Big Data tools and incorporate those tools with user experience, expertise and resources to deliver an integrated Big Data intermediate service layer. This layer will deliver customized solutions denominated Data Pipelines for large volume EO and non-EO datasets access, retrieval, processing, analysis and visualisation. The BETTER solutions will focus in addressing the full data lifecycle needs associated with EO Big Data to bring more downstream users to the EO market and maximise exploitation of the current and future Copernicus data and information services. BETTER developments will be driven by a large number of Big Data Challenges to be set forward by the users deeply involved in addressing the Key Societal Challenges. The World Food Programme, the European Union Satellite Centre and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - Zurich working in the areas of Food Security, Secure Societies and GeoHazards will be the challenge promoters. During the project each promoter will introduce 9 challenges, 3 in each project year, with an additional nine brought by the “Extending the market” task, in a total of 36 challenges. The Data Pipelines will be deployed on top of a mature EO data and service support ecosystem which has been under consolidation from previous R&D activities. The ecosystem and its further development in the scope of BETTER rely on the experience and versatility of the consortium team responsible for service/tool development from DEIMOS and Terradue. This is complemented by Fraunhofer Institute’s experience in Big Data systems, which brings to the consortium transversal knowledge extraction technologies and tools that will help bridge the current gap between the EO and ICT sectors.

The Co-ReSyF project will implement a dedicated data access and processing infrastructure, with automated tools, methods and standards to support research applications using Earth Observation (EO) data for monitoring of Coastal Waters, leveraging on the components deployed SenSyF. The main objective is to facilitate the access to Earth Observation data and pre-processing tools to the research community, towards the future provision of future Coastal Waters services based on EO data. Through Co-ReSyF‘s collaborative front end, even young and/or inexperienced researchers in EO will be able to upload their applications to the system to compose and configure processing chains for easy deployment on the cloud infrastructure. They will be able to accelerate the development of high-performing applications taking full advantage of the scalability of resources available in the cloud framework. The included facilities and tools, optimized for distributed processing, include EO data access catalogue, discovery and retrieval tools, as well as a number of pre-processing and toolboxes for manipulating EO data. Advanced users will also be able to go further and take full control of the processing chains and algorithms by having access to the cloud back-end and to further optimize their applications for fast deployment for big data access and processing. The Co-ReSyF capabilities will be supported and initially demonstrated by a series of early adopters that will develop new research applications on the coastal domain, will guide the definition of requirements and serve as system beta testers. A competitive call will be issued within the project to further demonstrate and promote the usage of the Co-ReSyF release. These pioneering researchers in will be given access not only to the platform itself, but also to extensive training material on the system and also on Coastal Waters research themes, as well as to the project's events, including the Summer School and Final Workshop.