Tag: Earth Observation

Gisaia Presents ARLAS-EO at Eureka Meets the Atlantic Rio de Janeiro

ARLAS-EO at
"Eureka Meets the Atlantic"

EUREKA MEETS THE ATLANTIC focuses on the promotion of entities which bring about disruptive innovation aligned with the sustainable development goals.

March 29, 2022

Massive Earth Observation (EO) data that is not fully harnessed

The Earth Observation (EO) industry was set off with the upstream sector with deployment of satellites. The numerous constellations that have been orbiting the Earth to send back products continue to expand. This is great news for data generation because, the more diverse and massive the data, the higher the likelihood to get valuable insights.

But most of the EO data generated is not fully harnessed.
This challenge is posed by the massive nature of the EO data and the technical capacity to easily distribute it.

There are numerous societal benefits from Earth observation data; change detection, situational analysis and predictions. The faster more people can access the data, the easier it will be to put it to use. Gisaïa leverages its expertise in geo big data analytics to accelerate the promotion and valorisation of EO data.

Eureka Meets the Atlantic for wider Copernicus data applications

The “Eureka meets the Atlantic” seeks to advance the European Commission agreement to promote the use of Copernicus images and products generated, for positive impact in various sectors, such as agriculture, forestry, resource optimisation or infrastructure management.

At Gisaïa we have shown diverse use of Copernicus data using our ARLAS framework, a solution that facilitates rapid development of geoanalytics platforms for various use cases.

So, when the Portugal Space Agency put out a call for applications for Startup and SMEs to be part of the entourage going to Rio de Janeiro for the third round of Eureka Meets the Atlantic, we were excited to apply and be chosen among the ten companies on this mission. We will be among Spotlite, Agroinsider, Eyecon Group, Bold Robotics and Spin Works (Portugal), Sentinel Hub (Austria), World From Space (Czech Republic), Lelieur BV (Belgium) and Terradue (Italy) and Gisaia from France.

We use this opportunity to advance our goal to make the massive EO data, including Copernicus data; reachable, exporable and valued. The third Eureka meets the Atlantic will focus on how innovation based on Earth Observation (EO) can be disruptive in the current status quo of the blue economy.

Brazil Earth observation data industry

Brazil is an Earth Observation innovation leader in Latin America. In over 50 years of Earth observation activities, it has shown positive growth in both technological advancement and the societal benefits derived from EO investments. Also, Brazil evolving space governance measures and policies for revamping the country’s space program fosters confidence in their long-term investment in Earth Observation innovations.

Our solutions align with Brazil’s Earth observation sector’s quest to accelerate the EO downstream market for societal benefits, evidenced in their high investment in EO educational programs and innovation like the recent launch of AMAZONIA-1. The EO downstream ecosystem top drivers in Brazil are environmental and resources monitoring, change detection among others.

Brazilian EO sector players thus require solutions that easily facilitate multi-data sources for analytics which we provide. They need to consult data or diverse dimensions and from different sources for deeper insights. ARLAS framework eliminates any challenges linked to silos by merging the data regardless of their dimensions. This provides a powerful tool that will help the Brazilian EO stakeholders to quickly explore Copernicus data and others.

DOWNLOAD BROCHURE

Eureka is the world’s biggest public network for international cooperation in R&D and innovation, present in over 45 countries. 

If you are part of the Brazil Earth Observation sector, you can register here to attend the event where our representative will be happy to meet you.

Our team is also available to provide a demonstration of how our solutions can help you go further, faster.

REQUEST ARLAS-EO DEMO
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arlas.city

FOR PUBLIC TRANSPORT DATA ANALYTICS

Gisaia was at Autonomy Paris presenting arlas.city to authorities, operators and researchers for public transport data-backed decision making.

March 24, 2022

Unlocking data silos for a global viewPublic Transport Optimisation Grounded on Data

All the investment that has been made in public transportation can only be maximised if residents believe that they can rely on the system. But how can authorities and operators measure this? Gisaïa developed arlas.city to help address this very challenge.

arlas.city is a timely solution which presents public transport decision-makers with the opportunity to not only study current network challenges but to also go back in time and learn from service gaps. arlas.city merges, realigns and visualises public transport data that is often in silos, over time and space for a global view of the entire network. 

 Autonomy Paris presented us with the possibility to meet the relevant public transport stakeholders: authorities, operators and researchers. 

Responding to Travellers Needs

COVID-19 triggered many questions on the future of public mobility. While we are witnessing changes in lifestyle that also impact mass transit,  we know that the surest way to understand these changes lies in rigorous monitoring and analysis. This is where data plays a key role. Now more than ever, public transport decision makers need data-backed decisions.

Effective public transportation is marked by user appreciation which is indicated by; increased uptake, service endorsement and reduced personal vehicles use. This is easily achieved once flow bottlenecks are eliminated and access is promoted. 

Shared mass transportation is of course one of the sustainable means of travelling. When it works well, everyone benefits. We know that we are offering an important piece of the puzzle to present a global view of the data, leading to tangible solutions. 

arlas.city is built upon open-source technology making it easily customisable and extendable. It does not come with fixed analytics dashboards. Users can create new indicators based on their needs. In France, it is UGAP certified for easier acquisition. 

Public Transport Optimisation Grounded on Data

arlas.city can be used anywhere in the world where public transport data lies in silos to support data-backed decisions for optimised public transport services.

So, Autonomy Paris, an international mobility event, was not only a place to showcase our solution, we also wanted to use this opportunity to learn about public transport needs and trends. The event allowed us to contribute to the big picture, addressing effective public transportation for travellers of diverse needs. 

The future of efficient, reliable and appreciated public transportation lies in harnessing the power at hand; looking deeply at the information nested in the voluminous data generated everyday, in the public transport sector. 

If you stopped by our booth, you probably had a chance to exchange with the team and get a live demo of arlas.city. If you did not and would love to, get in touch and we will give a demonstration of how you can make the most of your data to optimise public transportation.

Contact us to book a demo in advance

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Gisaia
at Paris Space Week

Gisaia will be at Paris Space Week on March 14 - 15, ready to meet and show you how ARLAS Exploration and ARLAS-EO help accelerate Earth observation data exploration and uptake.

February 03, 2022

WHY PARIS SPACE WEEK

Unlike most sectors, Earth Observation sector players do not have many international events that unite stakeholders to explore industry trends. Paris Space Week is one of the few events that bring together many stakeholders from the spatial industry: upstream and downstream markets. Here, participants get to showcase and learn about the latest innovations besides discussing the future of the industry.

This year, Paris Space Week is expecting over 1000 attendees drawn from diverse countries and backgrounds; government, academia, and the private sector. The event presents diverse opportunities for attendees to network through different activities set in their agenda. Gisaïa uses this opportunity to keep up with the industry trends and meet with potential users of our solutions for geo big data analytics.

The Earth observation industry is quickly growing in significance and in size. This is partly due to the increase in new sensors and constellations deployed. They are also of a wide variety and when coupled with innovation in the ground segment, they generate data that is processed and can be distributed widely. The application of artificial intelligence to derive richer analytics and support change detection capabilities helps to reduce the “time to market” from academia to society, for evidence-based decision making. 

EO data’s significance in drawing valuable intelligence to benefit the society is without question. But, the increased data generation is not matched in consumption. That is why Gisaia provides solutions that helps EO sector players to quickly put their data in the hands of those who need it. We will be at the Paris Space Week, 2022 on March 14 -15 where we look forward to interacting, learning and sharing how the Earth observation downstream market growth can be quickly accelerated.

Showcase all available EO data in one place with ARLAS-EO

If you are an Earth Observation provider, you most probably get your products and data from multiple sources. Sometimes the data comes from in-house constellations plus secondary suppliers. Your users may need to access this data from the different sources for a single project. Providing this data on a single platform not only facilitates smooth exploration of the data, it also ensures quick retrieval.   

ARLAS-EO allows you to showcase all your EO data in one place. With the multi-collection feature, users can easily select the data source and even more interesting, select multiple sources to view the available data all at once. Also, for EO data providers, this helps centralise maintenance, support and even supply, eventually limiting costs linked to operations

Now more than ever, data platforms need to be intuitive and responsive besides being informative.

Data-driven evidence with ARLAS Exploration

Gisaia also provides ARLAS-Explo upon which ARLAS-EO  is built. It facilitates geospatial intelligence. Built upon big data frameworks, it scales with your data eliminating the challenges posed by a growing data archive. Arlas-Explo allows EO data users to get deeper insights from their collection, supporting data-driven evidence. You can carry out analytics on various datasets at the same time by easily cross-linking them. This helps save on the time it takes to move from one view to the next or one platform to another. 

ARLAS-Explo is versatile as demonstrated in various applications leveraging Earth observation data: telecommunication, fleet management, insurance, maritime intelligence, among other change detection subjects. Whether you are working on sustainable management of resources, security, or business optimisation linked to Earth observation, our solutions built upon the ARLAS stack are an important brick to support data-driven decision making.

Come meet us at Paris Space Week, booth number S8 where our team will be waiting to hear about your mission and give you live demonstrations of both ARLAS-EO and ARLAS-Explo.

Contact us to book a demo in advance

BOOK DEMO
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USING DATA TO DESIGN EFFECTIVE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION IN AFRICA

Gisaia proposes HAKIKA, a systematic solution to build public transport data banks and geoanalytics for effective public transit planning and management.

May, 19th 2022

UNDERSTANDING THE PUBLIC TRANSPORT NETWORK IN PLACE

In many cities in Africa, public transportation is only licenced by public authorities then run independently by private entities. This means that often, authorities cannot ensure effective services to travellers. Private owners, while providing a valuable service, tend to prioritise  their business interests first. However, they would all benefit from an optimised and well managed transport network .

Authorities want to ensure fair mobility with services reaching as many travellers as possible, while service providers seek fast routes and filling times to optimise their fuel and expenses for positive returns.Therefore, although travellers in Africa want to go far, and fast, like everywhere in the world, they are stuck in the middle with uncertainties at many levels: they cannot confidently say how far they have to walk to catch a bus, when it will show up or how long the journey will take to their destination.

However, these challenges have solutions: Public transport authorities, when equipped with the right tools, can ensure reliable services for the travellers.

They can act as bridges between the service providers and the users to ensure equitable distribution of services.

Among the many indicators on public transport efficiency, there are three key ones. Frequency.  Accessibility.  Reliability. How can authorities assess and gauge them especially in a complex public transport network: many routes, many operators with diverse transport modes?

Gisaïa developed arlas.city to help address this very challenge. arlas.city is a timely solution which offers public transport decision-makers the opportunity to get a global view of the system in place. It merges, realigns and visualises public transport data that is often in silos, over time and space.

Africities presents us with the possibility to meet the relevant public transport stakeholders: authorities, operators and researchers who can take advantage of our project HAKIKA, to develop a robust public transport data bank and explore these data for decision making. HAKIKA is a word in Kiswahili that means: ‘to be sure’. 

THE VALUE OF A PUBLIC TRANSPORT DATA BANK

In the era of big data, Africa is not left behind. From health to education and even technology, in both public and private sectors, Africa is not shy to build digital knowledge bases and consult them for decision making.

But only a few African cities have a public transport data bank, and in fact most cities lack it. This rich resource would not only inform authorities in African cities of their public mobility situation, but it could also allow them to proactively avoid errors made in western countries before they started consulting data ( underserved areas, long waiting times, poor connection between intermode changes, among others) when designing their networks and services. 

Most African cities are young and currently experiencing rapid growth in population, And in Africa, more than anywhere else, city travellers rely on public transportation to meet their social and economic needs. A trend that should be encouraged because shared transportation is shown to have many benefits for both travellers and the environment. The global push to get more people to use shared transportation can be guided in Africa, as it is in other places, by data-based analytics.

The HAKIKA project proposed by Gisaia offers: 

  1. A systematic approach to generate data.
  2. A reliable system to transform the data to global standards
  3. A scalable solution, arlas.city, to put this data insights into the hands of decision makers

To generate the data, HAKIKA relies on a robust device developed by CLS. 

CLS is a company that provides tracking technology for various uses: animals, ships, road vehicles and more. Their solution is based on satellite technology to guarantee systematic and uninterrupted data collection. 

To transform the data, Gisaia leverages its data engineering and data scientists team : they use machine learning to produce algorithms to standardise the data. This step gives the data points generated the capacity to be extensively analysed and to provide valuable insights on the service offer.

But data banks are only useful when exploited.

 

DATA-BACKED DECISION MAKING

The value of generating and maintaining a public transport data bank is to use it for service optimisation for effective public mobility. 

HAKIKA’s third axis is based on arlas.city, a powerful geoanalytics cloud solution built on the latest big data technologies.

This allows arlas.city users anywhere, anytime to explore, visualise and analyse massive and diverse public transit data. Authorities can, for instance, use it to quickly identify bottlenecks. They can also identify underserved, or overserviced areas, and take action to ensure more efficient and equitable services.

Contact us to book a demo in advance

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Arlas EO solution software for building Earth Observation Data catalogues

Gisaia IN

DOMINO-X PROJECT CONSORTIUM

  22 Octobre 2021, Media Release

Media release, 22 Octobre 2021

Our team joins others from the French space sectors to form a consortium that has been chosen by the Directorate General of Enterprises (DGE) and Centre National d’Études Spatiales for the DOMINO-X project.

We are proud and happy to contribute to this innovative initiative that will exploit Cloud and Artificial Intelligence technologies to standardize the architectures of ground-based Earth Observation segments and promote the emergence of a modular product and service offering. This will facilitate a need to offer customers lower costs for their requests.

Airbus Defence and Space are leading the DOMINO-X  consortium that brings together other experts from: Airbus, Thales Alenia Space, Safran, CS Group, Orange and Capgemini, Gisaïa, Stack Labs, Human design Group, Geotrend and Leanspace.

Gisaïa will be fronting our solution, ARLAS  for geospatial data analytics . This is not the first time that Gisaïa joins some of the consortium members and offers solutions that simplify the access to Earth Observation products. ARLAS is part of the framework that Theia and Dinamis are built on. 

ARLAS is open source architecture software that is also built on the latest big data technologies making it both easily interoperable with other solutions. It scales easily with a growing archive . This is important in the DOMINO-X mission which seeks to explore volumes of Earth Observation data, from diverse product families. But that is not all, ARLAS will also be offering interactive visualisation of the data with a simplified filtering process that makes it easy to quickly sort through data and find what one is looking for. 

The DOMINO-X ultimate quest is to deliver valuable insights for decision making from Earth Observation data by making it accessible to as many users as possible.

For more details contact 

dolphine.rambaud@gisaia.com

 About Gisaïa:

Gisaïa brings seven years of geo-big data analytics expertise, and a robust geo-analytics solution, “ARLASⓇ”. The ARLASⓇ framework has been tried and tested in diverse use cases for geospatial intelligence, especially in Earth observation data optimisation.

EXPLORE EARTH OBSERVATION DATA WITH ARLAS

June 30, 2020

Geospatial Intelligence from Earth Observation

Today the United Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) records over 2000 active satellites are orbiting Earth. Most are earmarked for other functions like communications, technology development, navigation and space science. 884 of these satellites are deployed for Earth observation.They are observing Earth and sending back diverse information from; biological, physical and even chemical data on our planet.

The interest in Earth observation started with the launch of Sputnik back in 1957 and grew exponentially in the last 20 years. Earth observation has since evolved to take advantage of other remote-sensing technologies to include extra dimensions to the spatial and temporal values collected, like hyperspectral images, creating big linked geospatial data.

EXPLORING THE RICH MATTER IN EO BIG DATA

A study published by Acta Astronautica, observes that while the initial players in Earth Observation (EO) were governments and large corporations, the field is witnessing an increase in the private sector actors. This is not only ramping up the volume and velocity of the data collection but, it has made EO data more accessible and affordable. 

10 years ago fewer active satellites were observing the earth. Terabytes of data were generated. Yet, we had no capacity to neither store nor analyse that volume of data. Using the right technology, institutions can now access the full data value-chain and mine gems from data embedded in earth observation products even with current greater volumes and higher velocity.

The increase in EO producers – satellite manufacturers and launchers – is in tandem with EO consumers – data processors and analysts. Establishments find newer use-cases for EO objects that are especially valuable in geospatial intelligence: from environmental analysis that informs policies to urban planning that leads to smarter cities and not to forget IoT tracking. 

Firms are especially investing significantly in big data analysis for business intelligence. Whether the intent is to reduce costs or save time, the outcome in speedy decision making leads to increased revenue.

Gisaia’s ARLAS® framework, an open-source technology, is developed to create high-value information for policymakers in the public and private sectors. Currently, it is deployed by France’s consortium of Earth Observation and Environmental sciences, Theia and also by Data-terra as Dinamis. They both use ARLAS technology for Earth observation cataloguing and analysis of Earth observation objects. 

Example of filters using cloud coverage and location by name on Dinamis
Search results based on query on cloud/time/location on Dinamis over La Reunion

SOME PRICKLY POINTS WITH EARTH OBSERVATION ANALYSIS TOOLS

If we look back, we see that the journey for the pioneers in Earth observation was not always easy. Billions of earth observation objects were left in the archive with little to no exploration due to the amount of time, and expertise that was required to sift through them.

Even with improved technology, many EO producers find it difficult to aggregate data from different sources for studies. Like, how do you know that you have chosen the right image to analyse? This alone, can be a tedious exercise that takes a lot of man-hours, sometimes, looking at millions of images with no certainty in results.

While some tools can now visualise the objects, often there isn’t an option to pre-visualise, allowing one to check if the image meets a criteria for the query like; cloud coverage or mission type. 

It is no wonder that most of these tasks are mostly relegated to data scientists and IT professionals within teams as they often require some knowledge in coding.

 

ARLAS® FOR EARTH OBSERVATION

As the ARLAS® framework was initially conceived for earth observation, its development has evolved to absorb some prickly points in geospatial big data technologies’ usage. 

The main principle behind ARLAS is to make it accessible. One does not have to be a coder nor a data scientist to use it. This then cuts the amount of time spent on the technical details – setting up and filtering – to be used for instantaneous query of the data. 

One of the many resourceful features of ARLAS when conducting a search is, getting results to your query plus, suggestions close to your query. This gives you the option to quickly pick the right image.

There are several built-in time-saving configurations like the ability to save your filters if you use them often. Advance filters by detail like excluding images with cloud coverage or even sharing your URL with teammates to quickly view before making decisions.

Example of Catalogue with Theia over South of France

If you work with data from different sources, ARLAS is also able to aggregate them under one platform on a user-friendly interface. Because it is open-source software, there is no vendor lock-in giving you; 

  • Freedom to adapt it
  • Freedom to extend it
  • Freedom to change it

 

CONTACT US: OPPORTUNITIES ABOUND

There are numerous prospects in earth observation objects analysis and we have expertise in geospatial intelligence. If you have questions about how to combine the volume, velocity and variety from EO to create high-value information, get in touch with us at contact@gisaia.com