Preface

Who this book is for

Soil Health Data Cube for pan-EU (SHDC4EU) is imagined as a compilation of pan-EU layers organized into a cloud-optimized data cube and served through an API / as analysis or decision ready data (in later phases of the project this data will be accessible also via a mobile phone app and various web-GIS applications). This is one of the main deliverables of AI4SoilHealth WP5 (“Harmonised EU-wide soil monitoring tools and services”) and is intended to cover most of the pan-EU mapping and cloud data services efforts. This document describes general development principles and specifications of the SHDC4EU and envisages the proposed optimal usage of the data cube. To read and understand what a data cube is and which technology is used to optimize access and usability, please refer to the medium article.

Data and services

We provide code and examples of how to generate so-called Analysis-Ready training data sets. Some minimum conditions for a data set to be analysis ready include:

• It requires no special pre-processing to remove artifacts, harmonize values within columns, bind or subset data;
• It comes with extensive metadata so that there is no mistake about how was the data collected, prepared and distributed and by whom;
• It is ready in some standard format e.g. Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF; for vector data sets we recommend using (open) cloud-native data formats to distribute data either Geopackage, Geoparquet, Flatgeobuf or similar;