We show how technologies from scientific databases, semantic web and linked geospatial data can unlock the potential of Earth Observation data by presenting a fire monitoring application that we developed in project TELEIOS. This application is currently operational in the National Observatory of Athens, and it has been used by civil protection agencies in Greece during the fires of the Summer 2013. TELEIOS is a recent European project that studies techniques and tools for scalable access to Big Earth Observation data and the development of related systems and applications.
Manolis Koubarakis is a Professor in the Dept. of Informatics and Telecommunications, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has published more than 120 papers that have been widely cited in the areas of Artificial Intelligence (especially Knowledge Representation), Databases, Semantic Web and Linked Data. His research has been financially supported by the European Commission, the Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology and industry sources (Microsoft Research and British Telecommunications). He is currently co-ordinating project TELEIOS (http://www.earthobservatory.eu/) which is building a Virtual Earth Observatory using a combination of technologies based on Linked Data, Semantic Web (geospatial extensions of RDF and SPARQL) and Databases (array extensions of SQL). He also participates in Optique (http://www.optique-project.eu/), a recent European effort in the area of Big Data with application scenarios from the energy sector (Statoil and Siemens).
