Soil sealing identification and monitoring system

SIMS will develop a prototypical service focusing on Austrian public authorities to improve analysis of human-induced soil sealing processes and support monitoring, decision-making and reporting activities in Austria (e.g. towards the UN Agenda 2030 goal of implementing Land Degradation Neutrality (SDG 15.3) at a national level). Up-to-date, open, and free big Earth Observation (EO) data (Sentinel-2) will be leveraged by means of semantic enrichment directly in a cloud-based infrastructure using the worldwide first semantic EO data cube developed in and for Austria. Provincial and national scale user queries will be made possible and increasingly reliable by upscaling the container-based application and improving user management to support dynamic resource allocation. Semantic models addressing user-specific indicators (e.g. hot spot analysis through time) will be developed in close collaboration with institutional partners to identify and monitor soil sealing and de-sealing processes. SIMS has a thematic focus, but the overall aim is to remove barriers between EO midstream technology and downstream applications by allowing non-experts to conduct custom big EO data analysis on-demand in an interactive, reproducible, repeatable and easily accessible approach without additional software or programming skills instead of static pre-processed solutions.