ILIAD builds on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy and aims at establishing an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO). It capitalizes on the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, advanced computing infrastructures (cloud computing, HPC, Internet of Things, Big Data, social networking, and more) in an inclusive, virtual/augmented, and engaging fashion to address all Earth Data challenges. It will contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy as defined by the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Ocean, a hub for global, multistakeholder co-operation. The ILIAD DTO will fuse a large volume of diverse data, in a semantically rich and data agnostic approach to enable simultaneous communication with real world systems and models. Ontologies and a standard style-layered descriptor will facilitate semantic information and intuitive discovery of underlying information and knowledge to provide a seamless experience. The combination of geovisualisation, immersive visualization and virtual or augmented reality allows users to explore, synthesize, present, and analyze the underlying geospatial data in an interactive manner. The enabling technology of the ILIAD DTO will contribute to the implementation of the EU?s Green Deal and Digital Strategy and to the achievement of the UN Ocean Decade's outcomes and Sustainable Development Goals. To realize its potential, ILIAD DTO will follow the System of Systems approach, integrating all existing EU Earth Observing and Modelling Digital Infrastructures and Facilities To promote additional applications through ILIAD DTO, the partners will create the ILIAD Marketplace. Like an app store, providers will use the ILIAD Marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesized information, and value-adding services derived from the ILIAD DTO.

CLEAR-EO leverages on newly available satellite data like Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) and EUMETSAT Polar System Second Generation (EPS SG), along with European Cloud infrastructures like the European Weather Cloud, to develop an analysis and geo-spatial notification system on top of a federated data space. These core components will support the development of innovative applications and services such as on-demand decision making workflows for 1) flash floods in urban areas, 2) short and long-term Climate Change impacts adaptation in agriculture, and 3) accurate air quality forecasts, with the final goal to contribute and enhance the Copernicus and the EO/weather services ecosystem. CLEAR-EO teams up a multidisciplinary partnership from Research Organizations, weather forecasting centres, EO data and tech/cloud platform specialists to Group of Earth Observation (GEO)/Destination Earth (DestinE) contributors and SMEs to develop, demonstrate, and promote to relevant stakeholders and end-users new application developments and early exploitation of the new weather satellite data to support SDGs and European Green Deals.

The NextGEOSS project will implement a federated data hub for access and exploitation of Earth Observation data, including user-friendly tools for data mining, discovery, access and exploitation. This data hub will be supported by a strong commitment to the engagement of Earth Observation and related communities, with the view of supporting the creation of innovative and business oriented applications. The main general objectives for NextGEOSS are to 1) Deliver the next generation data hub and Earth Observation exploitation for innovation and business; 2) Engage communities, promoting innovative GEOSS powered applications from Europe; and 3) Advocate GEOSS as a sustainable European approach for Earth Observation data distribution and exploitation. NextGEOSS engages main providers of Earth Observation data, including Copernicus Collaborative Ground Segments and Core Services. While continuing to support the GEO-DAB and OpenSearch as the middleware components in charge of interconnecting the heterogeneous and distributed capacities contributing to GEOSS, NextGEOSS focuses on a fundamental change to facilitate the connectivity to the European and global data centres with new discovery and processing methods. It will leverage Web and Cloud technologies, offering seamless and user-friendly access to all the relevant data repositories, as well as providing efficient operations for search, retrieval, processing/re-processing, visualization, analysis and combination of products from federated sources. NextGEOSS includes a set of demonstrative pilot activities, which will showcase the system’s capabilities, and a number of initiatives devoted to engagement of GEO and other EO-related communities.