DTA celebrates Digital Earth Australia's win at 2019 awards

At last month’s Australian Government Digital Awards, Geoscience Australia received the ‘Outstanding government platform award’ for its hybrid cloud platform, ‘Digital Earth Australia’ (DEA).

DEA allows users to “view, download, transform and integrate” satellite images of the Australian landscape from 1986 to 12 hours ago, and is designed to help policymakers and industry monitor environmental changes and gain insights that could potentially help increase agriculture and mining productivity while also supporting the “rapidly growing market for spatial information and services”, according to Geoscience Australia.

The Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), which organised the awards, said the platform was built on the Digital Service Standard and is designed to provide industry-standard Analysis Ready Data (ARD) and analytic capability. It is free to National Computational Infrastructure and Amazon Web Services’ users and open publicly.

The team behind the platform — made up of sensing scientists, DevOps engineers, software developers and data scientists — met with government stakeholders during development and worked with FrontierSI to create a grants program for greater satellite imagery use, DTA said.

DEA is said to be the leading contributor to the Open Data Cube — “a global initiative to increase the value and use of satellite data by providing users with access to free and open management technologies and analysis platforms” — and is expected to continue exploring different applications for satellite and innovation.

Image credit: ©twitter.com/GeoscienceAus