We Know Where

Facilitating the transition of users of the African Regional Data Cube (ARDC) to the Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) platform.

The Challenge

Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) is the most significant, continent-wide effort to utilise Earth observation data, in Africa’s history. Funded by the Hammersley Trust and AusAID, the program’s establishment phase is being coordinated by Geoscience Australia. As part of this phase, DE Africa scaled up both technology and human resources throughout 2020. The scale-up presented the perfect opportunity for users of an existing Earth observation platform, the African Regional Data Cube (ARDC), to transition to DE Africa. This project aimed to ease the transition period of users from the ARDC to DE Africa, while creating enduring resources that will benefit new DE Africa users from across the continent.

Partners

The project partners were Geoscience Australia and DE Africa.

The Solution 

The project helped deliver three important objectives for DE Africa:

1. Transition Plan
   1. Seamlessly transitioned ARDC users to DE Africa.
   2. Understood both the current technical infrastructure capabilities, including a high-level view of user experience and requirements. These insights were used to determine gaps in capabilities and to plan a transition structure for notebooks and documentation within DE Africa.
2. Enhance and Create
   1. Improved the user experience and depth of technology resources in DE Africa.
   2. Uplifted, translated, migrated or created DE Africa notebooks in alignment with the format used within Digital Earth Australia to ensure existing user needs are met and exceeded with a clean user experience.
3. Capacity Building
   1. Supported the training and capacity building of DE Africa resources and ARDC users.
   2. Developed training resources and assisted with delivering workshops, targeted at ARDC users in the five countries currently part of the ARDC.

Impact

FrontierSI collaborated with the DE Africa team to develop technical training resources, as well as begin the process of improving the capability of human resources in the region.

DE Africa will improve understanding of Africa’s changing landscape, providing much needed insights, knowledge and analysis for more informed, strategic and inclusive decision making across the continent. This information will benefit policy makers and public officials, enabling them to make better decisions, and will increase commercial efficiency and economic growth for businesses and entrepreneurs across the continent.

Contact

To learn more, contact FrontierSI at contact@frontiersi.com.au or Project Manager, Caitlin Adams, at cadams@frontiersi.com.au.