Abstract
Our main objective is to provide a user-friendly data platform for researchers working with big environmental data available on our spatial data infrastructure and collaborating external cloud services. As a research centre, involved in many international projects, well defined and standardized access to data and processing facilities is paramount for effective collaboration with our partners. Collaboration means not only to share data and metadata but also reproducible software solutions. Consequently, partners can adopt those solutions into their own SDI and possibly become part of federated data network. To this end, building on open source solutions is key and comes with the additional benefit of being able to build solutions tailored to specific project requirements. Offering interfaces based on existing and widely adopted OGC standards guarantees interoperability with external applications and partners. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to maintain the EDP on a state of the art level with new systems and solutions appearing frequently. To keep up with the pace the EDP is designed with modular components that can be updated or substituted when better solutions become available. Part of this is also to contribute to the development of new solutions and standards like the H2020 openEO project. It defines an API for accessing big earth observation cloud processing infrastructures and fosters open development of backend-drivers and clients libraries in R, Python and Javascript for harmonized access to a very heterogeneous service landscape.