EO AFRICA R&D Innovation Lab: Design Principles and Key Features

EO AFRICA R&D Facility is a flagship initiative of EO AFRICA with an overarching long-term (> 10 years) goal of supporting an African-European collaboration to enable an active research community and creative innovation processes for a continuous development of Earth Observation (EO) capabilities in Africa. Besides offering a) technical and financial support for 30 research projects to address African EO research challenges related to water scarcity and food security, and b) establishing a digital capacity development platform (Space Academy) to provide domain specific training through face-to-face courses, online courses, webinars, and a massive open online course, the Facility also provides a cloud-based EO data analysis environment (Innovation Lab) to support researchers in accessing and utilizing EO data to produce high-level products and develop innovative EO applications. The Innovation Lab aims to simplify access to data and products (in-situ and EO) and use of open-source algorithms, models, and tools to obtain information relevant to SDGs, as well as to develop original algorithms and applications adapted to African solutions. The presentation provides information on Virtual Research Environments (VREs) of the Lab that allow co-located data and computing services making full use of the Copernicus DIAS infrastructure, explains the technical architecture and key features of the platform, and presents the operation timeline. EO AFRICA R&D Facility and the Innovation Lab are funded by the ESA, Contract No. 4000133905/21/I-EF.