The increase of social media use in recent years has shown potential also for the identification of specific trends in the data that could be used to locate earthquakes. In this work, we implemented a pipeline that uses Twitter data to identify locations of earthquakes and use the information to trigger EO data analysis. We tested the pipeline for almost a year over Japan, an area where earthquake events are frequent, as well as the use of social media in the population. Here, we show the results and discuss the potential development of such procedures. In the future, considering the rapid development and the increase of satellite constellations aimed at global coverage with short revisit times, algorithms of this kind could be used to prioritize satellite acquisitions for the detection of the areas most affected by earthquake damages.

TELEIOS is a recent European project that addresses the need for scalable access to petabytes of Earth Observation data and the discovery and exploitation of knowledge that is hidden in them. TELEIOS builds on scientific database technologies (array databases, SciQL, data vaults) and Semantic Web technologies (stRDF and stSPARQL) implemented on top of a state of the art column store database system (MonetDB). We demonstrate a first prototype of the TELEIOS Virtual Earth Observatory (VEO) architecture, using a forest fire monitoring application as example.

Image understanding and retrieval for metric SAR data needs to be tackled by specific algorithms in order to exploit the specific metric scale scene characteristics and the typical sensor phenomenology. A composite approach is developed to this end. Extraction, characterization and simplification/grouping algorithms are employed together with super-resolution for isolated bright scatterers, scatterer alignments and uniform backscatter and texture areas to populate a geospatial database. The generated descriptors can be navigated via different data viewers for scene understanding and data retrieval applications. Examples on real metric SAR data are given.