PhD defense on "Big Earth data" within the Doctoral College "GIScience"

Martin Sudmanns impressively defended his PhD Thesis “Big Earth data disruption in Earth observation: A geospatial perspective of a transition process”.

Over the last four years, Martin aimed to explore big Earth data as a recent trend from a geospatial perspective and investigated whether this perspective could add unique value to tackle some technological challenges, such as EO data management and processing, but also with the production and the value of geospatial information.

In eight peer-reviewed publications, Martin focused on three sub-topics:

-       New ways of visualising the EO data distribution, detecting systematic errors, but also the potential for geographic stratification of methods.

-       Approaches that support analysis units on the object level at different scales were addressed as a novel logical data model for managing and quering objects and their spatio-temporal attributes.

-       A “semantic sphere” was investigated and prototypically developed as facilitator for connecting EO data to real-world concepts and integrating different data sources to overcome the semantic gap between data and categorical information, a.

This research contributed to a better understanding of big Earth data distribution and potentials for their visualisation, an approach for a logical layer as data model for managing spatio-temporal objects in big Earth data technology, and the development of a semantic sphere on EO data cubes.

Martin will start his Postdoc career at Z_GIS at the University of Salzburg further deepening his research in EO data cubes. We wish Martin all the best on his future road of life!