The Copernicus App Lab aims at bridging the digital divide between the established, science-driven Earth observation community and the young, innovative, entrepreneurial world of mobile developers by establishing of a proof-of-concept for providing the data from the Copernicus Land, Marine Environment and Atmosphere Monitoring Services as Linked Open Data (LOD) for take-up of EO data in mobile applications. The experiences of the consortium as key technology provider in various international competition events, such as the Copernicus Masters, shows that easy access to data is crucial for the success of EO business development. Main benefits: - Empowering the uptake of Copernicus Services in the mobile developer community by offering a one-stop-shop for mobile developers who wish to integrate Copernicus data into their value-added services via the tools needed and in the format known by mobile developers. - Improving data utilization by publishing value-added products from Copernicus data and services as Linked Open Data finally leading to better and more numerous mobile Copernicus apps. - Trigger business opportunities along the value added chain of EO data and services by providing tools for publishing and interlinking EO data, for querying EO data and for visualizing EO data. - Engaging the user community by setting a strong focus on dissemination activities and by collecting user feedback during a virtual beta testing phase and direct exchange with mobile developers during an ESA Space App Camp.

OTTERS will aim at promoting and scaling up successful citizen science (CS) initiatives in the marine and freshwater domains via 1) accelerating the co-creation of standards in data collection, semantics, data quality, and data management making sure to abide by all ethical and legal standards; 2) promoting and scaling up successful water-related CS initiatives by clustering them under co-designed Spring-to-Sea campaigns to foster agency and increase ocean literacy; 3) connecting the citizen-generated data to other EU-funded projects and portals, including the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) and Digital Twins of the Ocean (ILIAD) to ensure the accessibility and reuse of the data and abide by all FAIR principles; 4) demonstrating the effectiveness of citizen science in participatory research, environmental monitoring and changing people’s behaviors to ensure the sustainability of water ecosystems and reach the goals of the EU Water Framework Directive and UN Decade of the Ocean.

ILIAD builds on the assets resulting from two decades of investments in policies and infrastructures for the blue economy and aims at establishing an interoperable, data-intensive, and cost-effective Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO). It capitalizes on the explosion of new data provided by many different earth sources, advanced computing infrastructures (cloud computing, HPC, Internet of Things, Big Data, social networking, and more) in an inclusive, virtual/augmented, and engaging fashion to address all Earth Data challenges. It will contribute towards a sustainable ocean economy as defined by the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Ocean, a hub for global, multistakeholder co-operation. The ILIAD DTO will fuse a large volume of diverse data, in a semantically rich and data agnostic approach to enable simultaneous communication with real world systems and models. Ontologies and a standard style-layered descriptor will facilitate semantic information and intuitive discovery of underlying information and knowledge to provide a seamless experience. The combination of geovisualisation, immersive visualization and virtual or augmented reality allows users to explore, synthesize, present, and analyze the underlying geospatial data in an interactive manner. The enabling technology of the ILIAD DTO will contribute to the implementation of the EU?s Green Deal and Digital Strategy and to the achievement of the UN Ocean Decade's outcomes and Sustainable Development Goals. To realize its potential, ILIAD DTO will follow the System of Systems approach, integrating all existing EU Earth Observing and Modelling Digital Infrastructures and Facilities To promote additional applications through ILIAD DTO, the partners will create the ILIAD Marketplace. Like an app store, providers will use the ILIAD Marketplace to distribute apps, plug-ins, interfaces, raw data, citizen science data, synthesized information, and value-adding services derived from the ILIAD DTO.