EuroGEO 2022: New collaborations & engaging with the EO innovation landscape

Diego Simoni (Trust-IT),
Onboarding of end-users & uptake monitoring, Task Leader.

Last 7 to 9 December, we attended the EuroGEO Workshop in Athens which gathers major European and non-European players from the Earth Observation world every year. 

About 300 participants from Earth Observation environmental players from governments, the European Commission and other EU-funded projects, like EO4EU were present. The event was structured mainly in parallel sessions allowing a more in-depth discussion of the topics covered and at the same time an easier and more productive interaction between the audience.

Participation in the event was an important opportunity to make EO4EU known as we wanted to establish concrete synergies with productive collaborations. At the event we set-up new links with projects to carry out joint dissemination activities. EO4EU will also be sharing the EO4EU platform under development and its use cases at a value creation conference mid-next year. EO4EU also presented a poster providing an overview of the platform to the EuroGEO community

EO4EU under the spotlight

On Wednesday, 7 December 2022, EO4EU Project Coordinator Stathes Hadjiefthymiades  from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens delivered a presentation titled “EO4EU: AI augmented ecosystem for EO data accessibility with XR User Interfaces for Service and Data Exploitation”.  

Stathes presented a comprehensive overview of the EO4EU platform components through its five fundamental pillars:

1. Integration with major EO data providers
2. Machine learning-powered dynamic annotation for EO data
3. Interoperability layer
4. Visualisation tools for policy and decision support
5. Semantic-enhanced knowledge graph

Stathes explained that the platform will be affordable for everyone, and usable both by end-users without special technical experience, as well as technical users such as developers or service providers.

Finally, seven use cases were presented, from heterogeneous sectors such as healthcare, sea route planning, ocean monitoring, food, soil erosion, environmental pest and crisis management, on which the development of the platform itself will be based. The heterogeneity of the use cases will enable the platform to be effective in numerous contexts.

An aspect that was particularly appreciated was the project’s user-focused approach. EO4EU will explore applications across various domains through its seven use cases, making access and use of earth observation (EO) data easier for environmental agencies, organisations and research institutions, governments, and even businesses. We believe this approach provides us with a solid foundation and will be an important demonstrator that will deliver a successful future exploitation strategy.

Main takeaways

Overall, the immediate outcome for us was to be able to establish many synergies with projects with similar objectives to those of EO4EU, in particular by participating in the Land Cover & Land Use Action Group. 

EO4EU was also invited to organise a session at the Sustainable Value Creation Summit, an event which will be held from 23 to 26 May 2023 in Lisbon. The event will focus on the methodology that projects must follow to create value towards society and the private sector, adopting exploitation strategies that allow them to continue to the next step once the EU funding period concludes. Stay tuned for more information on the agenda later!

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