Data Cubes – A Modern Approach for Handling Earth Observation Data

In the last decade, an upsurge of the free and open data access policy for Earth observation (EO) and Geographic Information System (GIS) data took place. It is practically impossible to manually collect, analyse, and process data since there is so much remotely sensed data available for every area of the Earth's surface. As a result, data cubes are now a new option for handling Big Data thanks to technological advancements. As a technological and analytical approach, the data cube concept provides a way to access, manage and analyse enormous amounts of EO data. This paper's main contribution is giving insights and guidance for choosing the most suitable data cube solution by comparing Open Data Cube (ODC), Euro Data Cube (EDC), Rasdaman, and Data Cube on Demand (DCoD) solutions based on provided satellite data, type of data storage, data uploading possibility by the user, available standardized web services, backend services for developers, and financial aspect. There is no best data cube solution in general, but depending on a size and scope of the project, available resources, storage type and integration costs, stated assets and liabilities of introduced data cubes should be taken into account and the most suitable solution can be chosen.