Earth Observation Data Integration & Fusion Research Initiative

Earth observation and data integration serve internationally to provide society with usable information for sound decision making in the areas of risk and resource management. Our global environment is changing, corresponding with the interaction of a natural system and a human system. This dynamic change has the potential to cause serious natural disasters, ecosystem service degradation, and has great impacts on public utilities and infrastructure, such as energy, health, water resources, and agriculture. This sort of problem not only acts as a constraint on socioeconomic activity, but is also a threat even to the survival of mankind; thus the concept of holistic data assimilation is becoming an internationally recognized focus of research among scientific group and political leaders, sparking a movement of global intergovernmental cooperation.

In order to meet such urgent scientific and social needs, it is initially required that all disciplinary fields cooperate mutually to find a breakthrough in solving these problems. It is also recommended that a sustainable service be developed strategically through cooperation among operational organizations. For this purpose, we have constructed a core data system which allows data users to have easy access to, and analysis of, numerous large-volume data sets that have been obtained from a variety of information sources. Given in particular the increased collection of earth-observation satellite data, and the rapid increase in numerical model output data as well, data volume in the system will inevitably become super-large scale, and the storage volume has already reached several dozens of petabytes (1 petabyte (PB) is 1E15 bytes) in the past ten years. Moreover, the difference in the data quality and its diversity of description for each academic field makes interoperability difficult between fields. These are cutting edge issues for research and development in computer and information sciences.

Through these challenges, EDITORIA has come to play an important role as an interdisciplinary organization, establishing a research consortium which consists of various departments such as public works, earth observation systems, information sciences, computer sciences, disaster management, and agriculture, all working together. EDITORIA is developing a demonstrative data system which effectively and efficiently integrates earth observation data and fuses this information: EDITORIA makes a significant contribution to the world by generating and disseminating breakthrough results for better understanding, prediction, and countermeasure development for the earth's environmental systems. In addition, EDITORIA collaborates domestically and internationally with other research groups, technological innovation centers, and operational organizations to expand and extend applicable example cases into social benefit areas, and to develop a sustainable system for distributing highly valuable information to the world.