Flexible Access to a Harmonised Multi-resolution Raster Geodata Storage in the Cloud

A viable approach for tackling the challenges of integration and analysis of geospatial raster data is to pre-process datasets into a common framework and store them into a cloud repository, accessible through a set of well-defined access protocols. This paper describes an initiative called GeoCubes Finland, where the aim is to provide a number of country-wide raster geodatasets in a common schema. In addition to more traditional access methods, a custom Application Programming Interface (API) has been designed for supporting the various tasks related to retrieval, use, visualisation and analysis of the contained raster datasets.