WASHINGTON, May 15, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Radiant Earth, the leading technology nonprofit working to expand access to Earth science data, has launched two new initiatives: Source Cooperative and the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation. These two initiatives are designed to increase the sharing of Earth science data and accelerate scientific research that will increase the shared understanding of our world.
Source Cooperative is a neutral data publishing utility. It will offer a standardized mechanism for data providers to publish data products and configure access controls to ensure secure and ethical sharing of data. Source Cooperative will also allow data publishers to charge for access to data, creating a mechanism to sustainably fund the creation of new Earth science data products. Now in private beta, Source Cooperative is the next generation of Radiant MLHub, Radiant Earth’s data sharing service that has been used to publish data from organizations including NASA, Planet, the University of Maryland, Microsoft, and Stanford.
While Source Cooperative makes it easier for people to distribute and access data, the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation will accelerate the adoption of highly efficient patterns and best practices that make Earth data more accessible and easier to use.
The Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation seeks to support the diverse audience of researchers and developers working to maximize the value of Earth science data. It is an expansion of Radiant Earth’s work to support the rapidly growing community of users that have adopted the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) metadata specification since its release in May 2021. The Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation will support similar coordination for other community-driven cloud-native projects and use cases.
“We urgently need to make Earth science data accessible and useful to the people who are most likely to be affected by climate change,” said Jed Sundwall, Executive Director of Radiant Earth. “While we live in a golden age of access to Earth observation data, much work remains for us to ensure that people can benefit from it. The Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation will allow us to collaborate with public and private sector organizations to train Earth scientists on how to make geospatial data easier to work with, more interoperable, and accessible to more people worldwide. Source Cooperative will make it easy for organizations to share data that follows open standards and best practices for data sharing. Combined, these two initiatives will make data more accessible, lower the cost of research, and enable more people from around the world to use data to address global challenges.”
To learn more about Source Cooperative and the Cloud-native Geospatial Foundation, please visit our websites at source.coop and cloudnativegeo.org. We encourage you to sign up for our mailing lists to stay up-to-date on our latest news.
ABOUT
Radiant Earth works to expand access to geospatial data that can be used to address the impacts of climate change and support conservation efforts. Our initiatives include Source Cooperative and the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation. We work with commercial companies, governments, academic institutions, non-governmental organizations, non-profits, and foundations to find new ways to help our global community collaborate and increase shared understanding of our beautiful world. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and GitHub.
CONTACT
Louisa Nakanuku-Diggs
202 – 596 – 3603
Louisa@radiant.earth
