Скачать или смотреть [CNG 2025] Cloud-Native Data Commons – Samapriya Roy

Samapriya Roy's talk at CNG Conference 2025 focuses on a community-driven, bottom-up approach to data accessibility. Rather than discussing specific data formats like Zarr, COG, or Kerchunk, Roy shares the story behind the creation of the Earth Engine Community Catalog.

Sam explains how this catalog was born out of a need from scientists and researchers who found that valuable datasets weren't readily available in a plug-and-play format within Google Earth Engine. The Catalog solves a key problem: access does not equal accessibility. Roy emphasizes that having data available is not enough; users need the compute power, a stable internet connection, and the financial resources to analyze it.

The Community Catalog addresses this by leveraging Google Earth Engine's free platform for researchers, which offers both the data storage and the analysis engine in one place. Since its inception five years ago, the catalog has grown from a single 200-megabyte data set to over half a petabyte of data, including:
8,000 drone images from OpenAerialMap
10,000 historical USGS topographic maps
Data sets on land cover, soil carbon, and more

The catalog also features tools for natural language queries, allowing users to find relevant data sets with simple questions, as well as apps that let anyone—even those without an Earth Engine account—explore and analyze the data.