Keiran Millard
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SeaSpace is a marine atlas part-funded by the UK Space Agency, and was set up to address a particular aspect faced by marine and coastal users, namely how to consume information from large data sets (typically from earth observation missions and numerical models) – without having to download and process large binary data files?

Users wanted a solution that was “like Google Maps” that provided a simple interface to communicate to them, in a meaningful way, what these large datasets contained.  What’s been delivered is not just a standalone atlas, but a standards-compliant WMTS with an API enabling others to use the service.

SeaSpace is not a scientific challenge – the technology pieces exist, it’s about taking what exists and tailoring  it to deliver the atlas—in particular large archives of marine data derived from earth observation missions, processing infrastructure for large datasets and standard web services that users are familiar with.  Formally three objectives were addressed in SeaSpace:

1. To exploit data across a range of different satellite missions observing the marine environment; advancing the uptake of existing missions and feeding back to the space community gaps in observing capability.
2. To help bridge the gaps between publically funded services for processing earth observation data (e.g. GMES1 / ESA Due2) and the consumption of this data at the community level; establishing a persistent relationship between these communities.
3. To introduce the Data as a Service (DaaS) concept and representation of earth observation data as explicit geographic Features Types, enabling the exploitation of existing data archives and ongoing missions.

From a technical point of view, the focus of the Sea Space project is about taking large and complex datasets and extracting specific information from them that conforms to definitions agreed within user communities. For the prototype SeaSpace atlas, the offshore renewable energy industry was adopted as a target user community.  This goes somewhat against how data services have traditionally been delivered which is to adopt a ‘lowest common denominator’ approach.  In SeaSpace we deliberately sought to process the data to maximize information available, irrespective about whether we were duplicating content.  So, if the user would like maximum, minimum and mean of ocean temperature we would generate these statistics and present them as separate information.  The parameters extracted for the trial atlas are shown in the table below:

This information service had to be developed in a way that could be deployed via a number of channels, including web services and direct ingestion into GIS software.  In order to deliver this information service, it was clear that a web map that allows users access to these features as a series of layers was the most appropriate.

SeaSpace adopted the Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) standard as it provided for good cartographic control of how the features were displayed, both on their own and in conjunction with other features.  In addition, it also offered the best option in terms of performance.  Given that user had reported finding existing  web map services for marine data very slow, we wanted to show this didn’t need to be the case.