The GEOSS Platform Plus (GPP or GP+) project is an ESA-led, EC H2020 co-funded contribution to the implementation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) starting 1st January 2022 with a duration of 3 years. GPP is aimed at evolving the European GEOSS Platform components to enable access to tailor-made information and actionable knowledge and will do so in close collaboration with different GEO partners (a.o. via the GEOSS Infrastructure Development Task Team) with a user-centric approach. GPP will focus on services to non-specialists in the domain of adaptation to extreme climatic events and to changes in climatic conditions. Drivers for this will be (i) the lessons-learned from the evaluation of the implementation of the EU Strategy on Adaptation to climate change (COM(2018)738)), (ii) the priorities identified under the European Green Deal and (iii) the requirements expressed by the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change including Societal Transformation. The project aims to fully exploit the GEOSS infrastructure and its components to the benefit of the users, to enable the connections with the data providers (including in-situ), which are relevant for the achievement of use cases, and to provide a user-friendly, up-to-date and therefore familiar environment, by making sure that the current trends in information technology are considered and exploited as necessary. By establishing synergies with relevant initiatives in the European landscape, GPP will concur to reinforce the European participation and leadership in GEOSS.

As mentioned in the GEO Strategic Plan 2016-2025, global environmental change is one of the primary challenges of humankind, even more so today than in 2003, when governments and international organisations committed to a vision of a future wherein decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations. The establishment, in 2005, of the Group on Earth Observations, and the creation of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), was a first concrete response to this challenge. EDGE, short for European Directed GCI Enhancements, is a EU funded project that will provide a further European key contribution to GEOSS, evolving its main common infrastructure elements, the GEOSS Portal (implemented and operated by the European Space Agency - ESA-ESRIN) and the GEO Discovery and Access Broker (implemented and operated by the Italian Research Council - CNR-IIA), recognizing the user centrality – and as such the challenges these users are facing – as the leitmotiv of these evolutions. Engaging the user communities, better understanding their needs, improving the user experience delivering solutions in response to the actual user requirements, advocating the benefits of GEOSS, raising interest and awareness amongst a comprehensive community of users are the main objectives of the project. There will be close collaboration with GEO flagships and initiatives as well as with communities identified in ESA initiatives like the Thematic Exploitation Platforms. The project will link with major international initiatives like Copernicus and CEOS and will consider the latest Ground Segment operations concept. Coordination with the GEO secretariat, the relevant foundational tasks and all relevant GEO stakeholders should guarantee the success of the project.

This proposal is based on two premises: that (1) increased autonomy is essential for future space exploration; (2) that existing programming methods are tedious to apply to autonomous components that have to handle an environment with continuous state variables. For well defined discrete-event environments the above rational agent approach is well developed; for a continuous environment, however, perception processes need to be linked with abstractions forming the basis of behaviour. As the environment changes, the abstracted models may also change. Hence, agents are needed that can use these abstractions to aid their decision making processes, use these in the predictive modelling of a continuous world, and connect these abstractions to both planning and goal achievement within rational agents.This project also intends to replace the current complex programming techniques, used for autonomous spacecraftcontrol, with simpler declarative programming. High-level, declarative agent programming languages have been investigated at Liverpool and such theories and languages will be developed further for agents that require predictive modelling capabilities. The Southampton team is experienced both in the formal handling of analytical and empirical models for control and prediction, and in developing control software for real satellites. The merging of these themes is very promising. Although the results will be transferable to ground vehicles and robots, this project will particularly illustrate the new methods in space applications, both in simulation and laboratory hardware demonstrations.