Glossary

AGDC

The Australian Geoscience Data Cube prototype, an early Australian implementation of the Open Data Cube. The AGDC has since been superseded by Digital Earth Australia.

API

The Open Data Cube Application Programming Interface gives programmers full access to the capabilities of the Cube, allowing query and advanced data retrieval.

ARD

Analysis Ready Data

AWS

Amazon Web Services: Cloud computing infrastructure provided by Amazon (United States).

CEOS-SEO

Committee on Earth Observation, Systems Engineering Office http://ceos-cube.org/

COG

Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF, a data file format optimised for efficient workflows on the cloud and remote reading.

CSIRO

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

DEA

Digital Earth Australia, a platform that uses spatial data and images recorded by satellites orbiting our planet to detect physical changes across Australia in unprecedented detail. DEA is the Australian implementation of the Open Data Cube. For more information see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea.

DEA Notebooks

Digital Earth Australia Notebooks, a open-source repository containing Jupyter Notebooks, tools and workflows for geospatial analysis with Open Data Cube and xarray. See https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/dea-notebooks.

DEA Sandbox

Digital Earth Australia Sandbox, a learning and analysis environment for getting started with DEA and the Open Data Cube. It includes sample data and Jupyter notebooks that demonstrate the capability of the Open Data Cube. For more information see https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/dea-notebooks/wiki.

DE Africa

Digital Earth Africa. For more information see https://www.digitalearthafrica.org/.

EO

Earth Observation

ESA

European Space Agency

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

FC

Fractional Cover. Fractional Cover (FC) is a measurement that splits the landscape into three parts, or fractions; green (leaves, grass, and growing crops), brown (branches, dry grass or hay, and dead leaf litter), and bare ground (soil or rock). For more information and for details of the methodology, see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea/products/fc.

GA

Geoscience Australia

Geomedian

Geometric median, a robust high-dimensional statistic that maintains relationships between spectral bands.

GEE

Google Earth Engine

GIS

Geographic Information System

HLTC

High and Low Tide Composites, a Digital Earth Australia product providing cloud-free imagery mosaics of Australia’s coast, estuaries and reefs at low and high tide. For more information see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea/products/hltc.

ITEM

Intertidal Extents Model, a Digital Earth Australia product that maps the relative extent of the Australian intertidal zone at regular intervals of the observed tidal range. For more information see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea/products/iem.

Jupyter notebook

A computational “notebook” that allows code to be run and presented alongside explanatory documentation, figures, scientific notation etc.

JupyterLab

An interactive web-based user interface for editing and running Jupyter notebooks. JupyterLab is used as an analysis environment on both the DEA Sandbox and the NCI’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

Landsat

A joint NASA/USGS program of medium resolution satellites that have been collecting publicly available Earth observation data continuously since 1972.

LCCS

Land Cover Classification Scheme

MADs

Median Absolute Deviation, used as a form of standard deviation for the geomedians.

MODIS

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, a sensor on board NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites that collects publicly available low resolution Earth observation data every one to two days.

NASA

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (United States)

NBAR

Nadir-corrected BRDF Adjusted Reflectance, where BRDF stands for Bidirectional reflectance distribution function.

NBART

Nadir-corrected BRDF Adjusted Reflectance with terrain illumination reflectance correction.

NBR

Normalised Burn Ratio, calculated from near-infrared (NIR) and short wave infrared (SWIR).

NCI

The Australian National Computational Infrastructure is Australia’s national research computing facility. It provides computing facilities for use by Australian researchers, industry and government. For more information see http://www.nci.org.au/.

NDVI

Normalised Difference Vegetation Index, calculated from visible and near-infrared light reflected by vegetation.

NIDEM

National Intertidal Digital Elevation Model, a Digital Earth Australia product derived from ITEM that maps the elevation relative to Mean Sea Level of the Australian intertidal zone. For more information see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea/products/nidem.

NIR

Near Infrared, referring to particular bands used to collect Earth observation data

ODC

Open Data Cube, an international open-source project developing the technology that powers Digital Earth Australia. For more information see http://opendatacube.org/.

PostgreSQL

The high performance database engine used as an index of Datasets by the Data Cube. It is both a relational and document database, and the Data Cube schema makes use of both of these capabilities.

Python

The programming language used to develop the Open Data Cube. It is easy to use while still allowing high performance access and processing capabilities. See http://www.python.org/ for more.

SAR

Synthetic Aperture Radar

Sentinel

A program of satellites from ESA that collect publicly available Earth observation data. The program includes the medium resolution Sentinel-2 mission, and the Sentinel-1 SAR mission.

USGS

United States Geological Survey

VDI

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is a virtual laboratory at NCI that provides a linux desktop environment for scientific computing. For more see http://vdi.nci.org.au/help.

WOFL

Water Observation Feature Layer (a WOfS observation for one point in time)

WOfS

Water Observations from Space, a Digital Earth Australia product that provides images and data showing where water has been seen in Australia from 1987 to the present. For more information see https://www.ga.gov.au/dea/products/wofs.

xarray

An open source project and Python package that for working with labelled multi-dimensional arrays such as those returned by the Open Data Cube (ODC).

YAML

YAML is a human friendly data serialization standard for all programming languages. It is used for all on disk metadata files and product definitions in the Data Cube. For more information on the YAML standard see http://yaml.org/.