Implementing a European Big Copernicus Data Analytics platform: The C-SCALE service offer in a nutshell
Authors: Chatzikyriakou Charis , Šustr Zdeněk , Fernández Enol , Backeberg Björn , Luna-Valero Sebastian , Brus Magdalena , Salazar Forn Xavier , Briese Christian , Scardaci Diego 
Published: February 2023

The EC H2020 C-SCALE (Copernicus - eoSC AnaLytics Engine, https://c-scale.eu) project implements a European open source Big (Copernicus) Data Analytics platform by federating the best-of-breed tools, competences and services by collaboratively building on the experience and competences of pan-European e-Infrastructures and existing project initiatives.The vision of the project is to empower European researchers, institutions and initiatives to easily discover, access, process, analyse and share Copernicus data, tools, resources and services through the EOSC Portal. To this end, C-SCALE delivers a federated compute and data infrastructure offering Copernicus and Earth Observation (EO) data, including a seamless user experience where the complexity of resource provisioning and orchestration is abstracted away from the end-user. The service offer of C-SCALE includes four main services:The Federated Earth System Simulation and Data Processing Platform (FedEarthData) service brings together the providers of data and processing capacity, so that EO products held in distributed archives across the federation can be easily discovered and seamlessly accessed and processed on batch as well as on interactive analytic platforms deployed on distributed computing resources anywhere across the federation.
The Metadata Query Service (MQS) makes Copernicus data distributed across partners within the federation discoverable and searchable. It is a STAC-compliant API that redistributes incoming queries among the federated sites and provides a consolidated response containing the list of aggregated results. The MQS exposes all STAC collections available within the federation on a single endpoint and provides a search interface that accepts the core parameters of the STAC API Item Search specification.
The openEO platform service provides intuitive programming libraries alongside with a large EO data repository to simplify processing and data management. This large-scale data access and computation is performed on multiple infrastructures allowing use cases from exploratory research to large-scale production of EO-derived maps and information in an accelerated way.
The Workflow Solutions are easily deployable workflows supporting monitoring, modelling and forecasting of the Earth system. They provide adaptable templates and examples, in the form of Jupyter Notebooks, of Copernicus and EO data and analysis workflows enabling users to more easily arrange a processing pipeline to create results on the C-SCALE federation.
In addition to these services, the project delivers the C-SCALE community, for the engagement with existing and new stakeholders, including both researchers and service providers in Earth Observation, documentation and training material.By the aforementioned services, the project aims to scale up the EOSC Portal through a continuously growing catalogue of services and resources supporting the whole research life cycle and enabling more scientific communities to access state-of-the-art services for their research activities. In addition, C-SCALE facilitates synergies between pan-European e-infrastructures operators, leading to harmonised services, improved use of resources and economies of scale.