Mozaika, data science for the improvement of the GIS and EO sectors
Mozaika, a new associated partner in EO4GEO, is a data company with a solid knowledge of satellite data access, management, description and use, meeting GIS and Earth Observation in many projects and partnerships.
1) What is your organisation currently doing for EO/GIS skills? (activities, partnerships, internal processes, etc.)
Mozaika has been engaged in projects involving GIS and Earth Observation for several years now. For this reason, our staff was signed up for online introductory courses of the GIS system, to ensure their basic knowledge of the argument. Additionally, we partner with ESRI Bulgaria in several projects and have hired the company to provide specialized tutorials for advanced GIS features, related to our R&D projects in cultural heritage. Further, we develop together with ESRI Bulgaria and SISTEMA GmbH (the provider of ADAM Platform) integrated solutions in distributed software architectures combining processing, search and display of numeric, symbolic, geospatial and earth observation data in a synchronized manner. To achieve this, our software engineers and architects work closely with ESRI Bulgaria’s GIS experts to design and develop technical integration. This ensures a strong transfer of knowledge related to GIS. Our collaboration with SISTEMA ensures, on the other hand, knowledge transfer regarding satellite data access, management, description and use. SISTEMA GmbH, via the ADAM platform, supplies our solutions with satellite data from different satellites depending on our needs and enables us to be satellite agnostic. Our dam monitoring and water resources management solution is integrated with the ADAM Platform and harvests meteorological data from satellites to display on a GIS component and to use to train AI algorithms for producing forecasts about the expected water volumes and levels. Thus, we develop methods of EO4AI (Earth Observation for Artificial Intelligence). We also use the satellite data and descriptions to model them into water resources management domain ontology that is the basis of our dam monitoring and water resources management solution (isme-hydro-bg project). Finally, we work with the European Space Agency on R&D projects to deliver solutions using EO and GIS, and with the Dialectology department of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences to build interactive maps of dialects using GIS.
2) What do you think is the priority at the moment for EO/GIS skills?
Concerning EO/GIS skills, different items should be considered of high priority for EO/GIS industry positions. It is important to educate students and practitioners on the types of satellite data information, descriptions, accessibility, and management; to discuss different usages, and the value of employing satellite data; to learn how to define use cases; to evangelize about the benefits of deploying satellite data-based systems; to sustain AI4EO and EO4AI approaches and applications, tools to process satellite data and images, GIS instruments and analytics, big data architectures; and, finally, to explore how geospatial information and GIS systems can interact with satellite data for user-facing applications.
3) Why was it important for you to join EO4GEO?
EO4GEO aims to create an ecosystem around Earth Observation and Geoinformation science to foster the uptake of satellite data in human- and society-centred applications. One very important facet in this endeavor is the development of proper skills to work with geospatial and satellite data and to master the instruments that are valuable to enable this. Mozaika as a company — The Humanizing Technologies Lab — develops innovative solutions combining data science with natural interfaces and human insight to build solutions tailored to human behavior attitudes and comprehension. Our semantic information infrastructures and knowledge modelling know-how cater to the objectives of EO4GEO. We are well aware that such a big goal to put satellite data usage for good purposes requires a collective effort of scholars and practitioners from around the world. That is why we would like to become part of this community to share knowledge, experience, activities and projects to move closer to this big goal.
