Attending the ESIP Summer Meeting 2020

Presenting TileDB and Project Cloud-Ready Data

Like much of the rest of the world’s events in 2020, science and technology conferences are largely meeting online. The ESIP Summer Meeting 2020 was no exception. ESIP, the Earth Science Information Partners, is an organisation that fosters interactions between people who deal with Earth Science Information, so that new partnerships can grow out of these interactions.

ESIP’s theme for the year is “Putting Data to Work”, a theme that has been reflected in the content of the Summer Meeting. In the Informatics Lab we put a lot of effort into making data usable, particularly on the Cloud, so that data users can put this data to work as effectively as possible. One recent example of this is Project Cloud-Ready Data. I was invited to speak on this project in the Cloud-Optimised Data session, with a particular focus on how we made use of TileDB in Project Cloud-Ready Data, which we also blogged about recently.

I joined four other speakers in presenting on a broad range of cloud-optimised data formats and how they’re being utilised. Here’s the video of the livestream of the event:

Here’s the time index for the talks in the video:

1. Ryan Abernathey — Rechunker (00:13:41)
2. Peter Killick — Project Cloud-Ready Data (00:25:35)
3. David Neufeld — Parquet and Athena for crowdsourced bathymetry data (00:40:55)
4. Trevor Skaggs — ICESAT2 Data and Entwine Point Tiles (00:54:19)
5. Patrick Quinn — EOSDIS Zarr Store (01:06:07)

By attending this meeting and presenting in this session I was able to share the learning the Informatics Lab gained through project Cloud-Ready Data about producing cloud-optimised data and the storage formats that are available for doing so. It was also good to discover that there are other people thinking the same sorts of things as we are! I have also been able to learn lots about the work others are doing in this and related fields, and I have made valuable relationships with other people working to solve very similar problems to those we are tackling in the Informatics Lab.