this is the second edition of SnapEarth newsletter.
In the newsletter we will keep you informed about our progress, key outcomes and events. We will also give insight on the project partners. This edition of the newsletter will introduce the first two partners: Qwant - the coordinator of SnapEarth consortium and Centre for Research and Technology Hellas from Greece. In addition, more information on the EarthSelf service and the EarthPress platform will be provided.

1. Join the SnapEarth community
2. Meet the SnapEarth Partners
3. What is Copernicus?
4. Multi-cloud and DIAS secured platform for high-performance deployment of services
5. EO data and AI in support of Journalism

The SnapEarth project involves 7 partners from Spain, France, Poland, Romania and Turkey. The Newsletter #02 presents two partners: Qwant and CERTH.

Qwant Nice, Paris, Rouen, Epina; France Milan; Italy Munchen; Germany

The coordinator of SnapEarth consortium. French SME created in June 2011.
QWANT develops, operates and provides internet users with an innovative Web search engine whose fundamental values are privacy, neutrality and openness. Since its first product launch in July 2013 QWANT demultiplicated its audience and is now the 41st website in France and 879th worldwide. www.qwant.com is also characterized by an adaptable layout of results according to the user query.
By offering innovative users interfaces, a broader view integrating social networks, which is more neutral (no ranking ‘biases’) in a safe and privacy-friendly manner (no recording of the internet user’s history or tracking), QWANT has found real success and today, has the largest audience ever achieved by a European search engine with over 70 million visits per month.
Qwant's secure and sovereign technology also allows to develop innovations for Internet uses adapted to the users' needs. It is also a formidable accelerator to propose corporate solutions that respond to the challenges of trust, security and neutrality in fields that are key to our future: the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and cyber security.

Centre for Research & Technology Hellas Thessaloniki, Greece

This is one of the largest research centres in Greece, founded in 2000. The mission of CERTH is to promote the triplet Research – Development – Innovation by conducting high quality scientific research and developing innovative products and services while building strong partnerships with industry and strong collaborations with research centres and universities in Greece and abroad.
CERTH has participated successfully in more than 1,000 competitive research projects.
CERTH is listed among the Top-20 Research Centres of the EU with the highest participation in FP7 competitive research grants for the period 2007-2012 and received numerous awards and distinctions.
CERTH consists of five Institutes and the Central Directorate and is governed by its Board of Directors. CERTH-ITI is one of the leading Institutions of Greece in the fields of Informatics, Telematics and Telecommunications, with long experience in more than 500 European and national R&D projects. For the last seven consecutive years, it is the first in Greece in the participation in competitive research grants (FP7, H2020). It is active in a large number of application sectors and technology areas.

Copernicus is the European Union's Earth Observation Programme. Thanks to a variety of technologies, from satellites in space to measurement systems on the ground, in the sea and in the air, the programme delivers operational data and information services openly and freely in a wide range of application areas.

Copernicus services deliver near-real-time data on a global level which can also be used for local and regional needs, to help us better understand our planet and sustainably manage the environment we live in.

Copernicus is supported by a family of dedicated, EU-owned satellites – the Sentinels -, specifically designed to meet the needs of the Copernicus services and their users. Copernicus also draws on a large number of in situ measurements systems, which deliver data from multitude of sensors on the ground, at sea or in the air. The Copernicus services transform this base of satellite and in situ data into value-added information by processing and analysing the data and validating the results.

These activities enables descript the current situation (analysis), the prediction of the  situation a few days  ahead  (forecast),  and the provision of consistent retrospective data  records  for  recent  years  (re-analysis).
It streamlined through six thematic streams of Copernicus services:

1. Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service  (CAMS)
2. Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service  (CMEMS)
3. Copernicus Land Monitoring Service  (CLMS)
4. Copernicus Climate Change Service  (C3S)
5. Copernicus Emergency Management Service  (EMS)
6. Copernicus Security Service

Earth Observation (EO) satellite missions provide an unprecedented increase volume of data production leading to new capabilities to monitor & analyze the health of our planet. However, these massive volumes of data are complex to analyze and are not accessible.

To address these issues, SnapEarth offers:

• a one-stop-shop solution;
• a semantized EO database continuously updated;
• a familiar entry point powered by QWANT search engine, to open up EO data to a wide audience;
• and finally, the ability to process this EO data with the cloud. SNAPEARTH is proposing a Cloud agnostic solution, allowing a holistic access to any cloud provider including DIAS, the major cloud & European cloud providers.

To valorize the data at large scale, SNAPEARTH proposes EarthSelf service. EarthSelf service is a set of services dedicated to data processing with several levels of integration. The solution has been designed to ensure a high level of portability, flexibility, scalability and security. The platform is powered by SAFESCALE, an open source multicloud secured management platform battle proven on various successful European projects.

Integration with the SNAPEARTH platform is intended to be accessible to users with various degrees of tech-savviness in the fields of infrastructure, resources provisioning, application deployment and data or storage management. To this end, SNAPEARTH proposes three built-in services offering progressive integration levels.

Earth Observation data is valuable for journalist’s reports to the public. aking advantage of the improved temporal frequency and spatial cover of the Sentinel satellite sensors SnapEarth aims to assimilate latest spaceborne retrieved information to support journalists in their work in near real time.

In this context, a dedicated services’ module aims to leverage on Copernicus monitoring services, like the EMS’s, EFAS and EFFIS. It will add in tandem to them the ability to exploit latest AI (Artificial Intelligence) techniques to automatically and unsupervised query through big data piles to deliver in minimum time required products. This way Petabytes of information, offered by Copernicus, is placed to the journalists reach. Journalists’ capabilities will be thus enhanced in regards to their reporting on natural or human-made disasters affecting various sizes of areas and populations.

If you are interested in the SnapEarth project please contact us:
contact@snapearth.eu