JOSS - Statement of need (Section)

[Jo-Schie]

issue to collect ideas for the JOSS Section "Statement of Need".

[fBedecarrats]

• Effort undertaken with initial focus on conservation monitoring, which requires multi-source, area-based indicators at scale.
• Quickly obvious that other domains have similar needs, often with the same data: agriculture, rural development, food security, infrastructure, urban planning...
• Existing spatial data are dispersed across platforms with heterogeneous access patterns.
• Researchers face a high cognitive and technical burden due to fragmented tools and formats.
• Most existing tools focus on specific data sources and lack interoperability.
• Target audience are monitoring and evaluation practitionners or policy evaluation researchers that are not specialist in remote sensing but need this data for their needs.
• Need also for alternative to mainstream PaaS solutions (Google earth engine, microsoft planetary computer) for several reasons:
  - credible studies demand long term replicability and affordability,
  - PasS ToS are subject to sudden arbitrary changes and computation not auditable
  - non-academic users do not have affordable access to PaaS
  - users in the South lack reliable internet connexions to use PaaS