On Monday 13th January, as part of the Architecture Implementation Pilot Phase 6 (AIP-6) Results Presentation Side Event at the GEO X Plenary, COBWEB was part of a significant milestone: data mixing between secured services.
In the session international participants witnessed simultaneous access to secured NASA and ESA OGC Web Services using the COBWEB Test Federation, powered by the rasdaman Big Data engine (Web Coverage Service), effectively bridging the Atlantic in real time serving protected data. The user signed on only once in the Test Federation, making for a significantly more straightforward and positive user experience.
How did it work?
The Web Browser based client (OpenLayers) on a laptop in Geneva accessed the NASA Ames server to fetch a color image taken by a NASA drone, Ikhana, while it was supporting local firefighters combatting large bushfires in California. From ESA, an elevation model giving height information about the Californian hills was retrieved, originally obtained from a radar satellite. Both were combined in the browser to a 3-D landscape that could be zoomed into and viewed from all sides, similar to a virtual globe like GoogleEarth.
The client made use of the OGC Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) standard, a language that allows clients to task servers with processing and filtering on massive spatio-temporal data assets, such as satellite images or climate data sets. The servers on each side of the Atlantic have their own independent access protection and therefore the pilot required the use of the integration capabilities of the COBWEB Test Federation, created under AIP-6 as part of the project’s contribution to GEOSS.
This pilot has shown that security-interoperable access is possible via an “Access Management Federation� setup. It establishes a well-defined level of trust between parties and supports Single-Sign-On: A user logging in at one organization within the federation and having access to a resource is able to access subsequent resources hosted by other federation members without having to provide their credentials again. Because of this powerful Single-Sign-On, applications can, as demonstrated, make use of protected services from different domains.
An international collaboration between two FP7 projects made this transatlantic gathering possible. Led by Secure Dimensions, COBWEB provided the overarching security solution. For the EarthServer project, Jacobs University and rasdaman GmbH provided the Big Raster Analytics engine, which NASA Ames Research Center and ESA are running on their servers. MEEO performed data ingest at ESA. Partners met during their collaboration in the OGC standards development and international research collaborations.
The live demonstration of COBWEB’s contribution to the GEOSS AIP-6 Pilot showed the power of access management federations for managing complex authentication contexts – something that is essential to the appropriate combination of data from different providers that will be used in COBWEB. And, altogether, the unique technology demonstration paves the way for services merging data across data centers, nations, continents – ultimately, across the planet.
Find out more
The federation used for the demonstration was the COBWEB Test Federation which you can find on our Development page. Currently the following organisations are taking part in the COBWEB Test Federation: EDINA (University of Edinburgh); NASA Ames Research Center; CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc); GDI.DE (Spatial Data Infrastructure Germany) Coordination Office; Secure Dimensions; EarthServer project; Catapult; MEEO; Environment Systems.
If you would like to find out more about the GEOSS AIP-6 Pilot Project or the COBWEB Test Federation please do get in touch, or take a look at our recent presentations and publications.
You can view a further news item on this “Big data mash up� on the Jacobs University website. You can also download the AIP-6 poster which was exhibited at the OGC stand at GEO-X, or watch this video of AIP-6 being demonstrated at GEO-X.