Funded be the European Commission as a H2020 project, openEO aims for a new web service standard to process Earth Observation data cubes.
At its core, openEO provides an http application programming interface (API) that defines how users can discover Earth observation data cubes and process them on compliant cloud back-ends. The back-ends run their own API instance, translating the http requests to their environment. The front end API implementation can serve different languages (R, Python, Javascript) on the client side. The openEO project has foreseen that APIs are implemented with an open source license (Apache 2.0).

A number of back-ends are already available that are compatible with this suggested openEO standard. For instance, within the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, an API implemented in Python is being developed that can discover and process geospatial data collections available in the JRC Earth Observation Data and Processing Platform (JEODPP). For the back-end, an in-house library is being developed under the European Union Public Licence (EUPL). In this presentation, we will highlight the openEO concepts and focus in particular on the JRC back-end implementation details.