The E-SHAPE proposal is driven by the need to develop operational EO services with and for the users and to create a conducive environment whereby the strengths of Europe are exploited towards addressing societal challenges, fostering entrepreneurship and supporting sustainable development. The proposal objectives are 1) to develop operational EO services with and for users active in key societal sectors; 2) to demonstrate the benefits of the EO pilots through the coordinated downstream exploitation of EO data and the utilization of existing EO resources; 3) to promote the uptake of pilots at national and international scale, across vertical markets (private and public) and amongst key user communities; 4) to enable the long-term sustainability of the numerous pilots, their penetration in public and private markets and support their upscaling; 5) to increase uptake by raising awareness on the solutions developed through tailored and well-targeted communication, dissemination and outreach activities. The proposal aims at setting-up and promoting a sustainable organization dedicated to users’ uptake of European EO resources, building on Copernicus and GEOSS through the development of co-design pilots (i.e. application-oriented products, services or solutions) built on a user-centric approach and delivering economic, social and policy value to European citizens. It has also the ambition through the development of 27 pilots organized in 7 showcases to deliver information that will also contribute to the three GEO engagements (SDGs, Paris Agreement and Sendai Framework).

DeepCube leverages advances in the fields of AI and semantic web to unlock the potential of big Copernicus data. DeepCube is impact driven; our objective is to address new and ambitious problems that imply high environmental and societal impact, enhance our understanding of Earth’s processes, correlated with Climate Change, and feasibly generate high business value. To achieve this we bring mature and new ICT technologies, such as the Earth System Data Cube, the Semantic Cube, the Hopsworks platform for distributed DL, and a state-of-the-art visualisation tool tailored for linked Copernicus data, and integrate them to deliver an open and interoperable platform that can be deployed in several cloud infrastructures and HPC, including DIAS environments. We then use these tools to develop novel DL pipelines to extract value from big Copernicus data. We implement a shift in the use of AI pipelines. DeepCube 1) develops novel DL architectures that extend to non-conventional data and problems settings, such as interferometric SAR, social network data, and industrial data, 2) introduces a novel hybrid modeling paradigm for data-driven AI models that respect physical laws, and 3) opens-up the DL black box through Explainable AI and Causality. We showcase these in five Use Cases (UC), two business, two on earth system sciences, and one for humanitarian aid. These are: UC1: Forecasting localized extreme drought and heat impacts in Africa, UC2: Climate induced migration in Africa, UC3: Fire hazard short-term forecasting in the Mediterranean, UC4a: Automatic volcanic deformation detection and alerting and UC4b: Deformation trend change detection on PSI time-series for critical infrastructure monitoring, UC5: Copernicus services for sustainable and environmentally-friendly tourism.