D2.2 - Report on the interoperability status of Copernicus services in light of EU regulations and Polar Data System Architecture (T2.4)

The purpose of this document is to explore the interoperability of available COPERNICUS services (together with some supporting national level data services), establishing an overview of the machine interfaces (API) the Copernicus services provide, what type of datasets are included and their relevance for the Arctic Passion project and for the arctic dimension in general. For each service the APIs are listed and analysed using the FAIR (https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) principles with special emphasis on the interoperability and conformance with European interoperability frameworks like INSPIRE. The outcome is that there are many COPERNICUS and national level services with hundreds of data sets already available. The impact potential of the available EO data is huge for the whole Arctic region.

While it varies from service to service, often the data is not even catalogued in a concise manner. Apparently, most of the most important data sets can be found in the main catalogue but there appear to be various sources of the data. Some of the data are behind legacy interfaces. The catalogues are not in general machine readable and searching for the data is not very easy. Human interaction is often required. The heterogeneity of the APIs in different services and the lack of applying unifying standards is the biggest challenge for integration of relevant Copernicus products in a unified catalogue and view. The WEkEO service gives access to many of the COPERNICUS services in a concentrated manner but even it doesn’t completely solve the issue. The WEkEO does provide a comprehensive list of the data available (OGC CSW) but provides a nonstandard interface for download. The Arctic Passion project should thus take an initiative to harmonize the APIs for different COPERNICUS and national level services.