rasdaman newsletter 01/2020


DIN Innovation Award for Inventing Datacubes

Never before has so much information about the Earth been available to mankind. Every day, satellites provide an enormous amount of data, for example on the climate, on changes in the atmosphere, or land use. The "Din-Spec 18114" standard developed by Dr. Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University Bremen, makes this data more readily available - and thus enables a multitude of new, societally relevant applications. Baumann’s groundbreaking work has now been recognized with the DIN Innovation Prize 2019 which is awarded by DIN Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. (German Institute for Standardization).

Baumann since long has been researching on the better use of geo data. The computer scientist has developed datacubes that can be used to group and homogenize millions of individual images along space and time. With Din-Spec 18114, developed in 2018, access to these datacubes is now standardized and simplified, users can access Petabyte-sized spatio-temporal data from their workplace. Previously, such analysis was reserved for experts with a high level of IT expertise.

The DIN Innovation Prize annually recognizes outstanding projects and commitments in standardization. In the award ceremony a video clip explained Baumann's contribution to Big Datacube analytics; it is online available at youtube.com/watch?v=aqKqyguKLn0.

The DIN award is the most recent one among a series of innovation awards received by Baumann and his research team for the development and implementation of datacube concepts, among others the DatSci Award 2019 for Data Science, the US TechConnect Innovation Award 2019 and the NITEC Data Science Award 2018.