Frontier SI AOGEO training in Jakarta
Two of our passionate data experts, Alex Leith and Caitlin Adams travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia, to run a workshop on using the Open Data Cube. This workshop focussed on taking Earth observation data and applying it to coastal applications. Simon Oliver from Geoscience Australia joined Caitlin, Alex and 15 enthusiastic participants at the workshop, which was part of the Asia-Oceania Group on Earth Observations Annual Symposium. The morning session involved presentations on analysis ready data, the history of the ODC, its uses and applications and an introduction to Jupyter notebooks.
For those unfamiliar with Jupyter, it’s an open source web application that allows you to create and share documents containing live code, equations, visualisations and narrative text. Caitlin, Alex and the FrontierSI team put together a set of these specifically for using ODC and Digital Earth Australia (DEA) data for varied applications. After the group had familiarised themselves with these tools, it was time to deep-dive into the data.
Caitlin said the first hands-on session focussed on conducting remote sensing analyses.
“We showed the participants how to use Jupyter notebooks, use data from DEA and conduct remotes sensing analyses,” Caitlin said. “By the afternoon they were ready to apply what they had learned to two coastal applications of remote sensing: extracting coastlines from Landsat 8 data and classifying water using Sentinel 1 (radar) data.”
Alex said the workshop helped participants understand the power of the Open Data Cube.
“Seeing that ‘a-ha’ moment within the group when they realised the potential of the ODC to conduct relevant analyses, was truly awesome,” he said. “Bringing this tool and demonstrating the value of the data products DEA produce for the region is important work for FrontierSI and GA to continue into the future.
“Our team, which traverses several organisations, has been working hard to develop these tools for over 12 months,” Alex said.
“Using cloud infrastructure, the tech team at FrontierSI has opened up access to DEA data, to provide an easy to use online tool for data exploration and analysis. This will allow users of all different skill levels to take Jupyter notebooks as guides and see how these new tools can benefit their work,” he said. “Building what we have dubbed the ‘DEA Sandbox’ took a diverse set of skills from our in-house team and in doing so we have created something that is genuinely useful.”
If you would like to give feedback on the sandbox or other aspects of the DEA work, please head to the survey the team has put together here.
Caitlin and Alex concluded the day by trying some local fruits, including salak, also known as snake fruit, and durian, which has a reputation of smelling like dirty socks and tasting like gold.
