Beschreibung: Satellite remote sensing offers the possibility to monitor the Earth's surface at high temporal and spatial resolutions. An important methodological field is the detection and interpretation of changes on the Earth’s surface. A robust and widely utilized family of approaches is post-classification change-detection (PCCD). In our research, we address an important challenge to using PCCD from a user’s perspective. Users often face difficulties finding changes in the result sets of PCCD that are relevant to their application scenarios. We propose a Visual Analytics approach that supports users in terms of exploring the temporal dynamics and the spatial distribution of automatically-detected changes generated via PCCD.

Beschreibung: Environmental scientists aim at understanding not only single components but systems, one example is the flood system; scientists investigate the conditions, drivers and effects of flood events and the relations between them. Investigating environmental systems with a data-driven research approach requires linking a variety of data, analytical methods, and derived results. Several obstacles exist in the recent scientific work environment that hinder scientists to easily create these links. They are distributed and heterogeneous data sets, separated analytical tools, discontinuous analytical workflows, as well as isolated views to data and data products. We address these obstacles with the exception of distributed and heterogeneous data since this is part of other ongoing initiatives. Our goal is to develop a framework supporting the data-driven investigation of environmental systems. First we integrate separated analytical tools and methods by the means of a component-based software framework. Furthermore we allow for seamless and continuous analytical workflows by applying the concept of digital workflows, which also demands the aforementioned integration of separated tools and methods. Finally we provide integrated views of data and data products by interactive visual interfaces with multiple linked views. The combination of these three concepts from computer science allows us to create a digital research environment that enable scientists to create the initially mentioned links in a flexible way. We developed a generic concept for our approach, implemented a corresponding framework and finally applied both to realize a “Flood Event Explorer” prototype supporting the comprehensive investigation of a flood system. In order to implement a digital workflow our approach intends to precisely define the workflow’s requirements. We mostly do this by conducting informal interviews with the domain scientists. The defined requirements also include the needed analytical tools and methods, as well as the utilized data and data products. For technically integrating the needed tools and methods our created software framework provides a modularization approach based on a messaging system. This allows us to create custom modules or wrap existing implementations and tools. The messaging system (e.g. pulsar) then connects these individual modules. This enables us to combine multiple methods and tools into a seamless digital workflow. The described approach of course demands the proper definition of interfaces to modules and data sources. Finally our software framework provides multiple generic visual front-end components (e.g. tables, maps and charts) to create interactive linked views supporting the visual analysis of the workflow’s data.

Beschreibung: SEVA is a scalable exploration tool that supports users to conduct change detection based on optical Sentinel-2 satellite observations. It supports the following essential steps of change detection: a) exploration and selection of optical satellite images to recognize proper data for the current application scenario, b) automated extraction of changes from the optical satellite images, c) analysis of errors and d) assessment and interpretation of the extracted changes.

Beschreibung: A common challenge for projects with multiple involved research institutes is a well-defined and productive collaboration. All parties measure and analyze different aspects, depend on each other, share common methods, and exchange the latest results, findings, and data. Today this exchange is often impeded by a lack of ready access to shared computing and storage resources. In our talk, we present a new and innovative remote procedure call (RPC) framework. We focus on a distributed setup, where project partners do not necessarily work at the same institute, and do not have access to each others resources. We present an application programming interface (API) developed in Python that enables scientists to collaboratively explore and analyze sets of distributed data. It offers the functionality to request remote data through a comfortable interface, and to share and invoke single computational methods or even entire analytical workflows and their results. The prototype enables researchers to make their methods accessible as a backend module running on their own infrastructure. Hence researchers from other institutes may apply the available methods through a lightweight python or Javascript API. In the end, the overhead for both, the backend developer and the remote user, is very low. The effort of implementing the necessary workflow and API usage equalizes the writing of code in a non-distributed setup. Besides that, data do not have to be downloaded locally, the analysis can be executed "close to the data" while using the institutional infrastructure where the eligible data set is stored. With our prototype, we demonstrate distributed data access and analysis workflows across institutional borders to enable effective scientific collaboration. This framework has been developed in a joint effort of the DataHub and Digitial Earth initiatives within the Research Centers of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, HGF.