What is Specklia?

Specklia is a cloud-hosted geospatial point cloud database produced by Earthwave Ltd as a freemium web service.

Specklia's users enjoy near-real-time sub-setting of continent-to-whole-world scale point clouds via space, time, and comparison operators applied to non-spacetime columns. With Specklia, geospatial point cloud products generated by missions with global or continental scope can be rapidly, interactively filtered to provide data relevant to specific, local problems.

Specklia was originally developed as an internal Earthwave tool during our work on the Cryo-TEMPO EOLIS project. Subsequently, we have incorporated it into CryoSat-2 data portal cs2eo as a backend microservice, and now we are offering it to you.

Specklia is accessible through an API. A Python client is provided for this API, which handles information as a Pandas GeoDataFrame for ease of use. Specklia users can upload their own data or explore a variety of freely available datasets, included those produced by Cryosat-2 Thematic Products and Cryo-TEMPO EOLIS projects.

Why use Specklia?

• Simplicity: Specklia serves geospatial point cloud data. We have avoided the accumulation of obscure and confusing features that make competing tools slow and hard to use.
• Affordability: Earthwave Ltd is a small company; this allows us to keep overhead costs to a minimum and pass on savings to Specklia's users.
• Collaboration: Specklia is designed as a single, lightweight microservice. Specklia's users can upload and share their own data. This allows Specklia to slot into larger architectures, systems and projects with a minimum of friction.
• Academic Focus: We've put together a well-documented service that is designed with the needs and skills of the academic community in mind.

Getting Started with Specklia

Access to Specklia is provided through an API.

We provide a Quickstart guide to help Python users in particular access Specklia via a Python Client.

We are working on adding video tutorials, online Jupyter notebooks, and further examples. For any further questions, please contact support@earthwave.co.uk.

To gain access and use Specklia with the Python client, you will need to generate an API Key.

Billing, Access Control, and Privacy

Specklia is currently entirely free to use, but has limits on the amount of data that a user can store and query. We are working on adding some low-cost paid options so that users can increase their usage limits.

Specklia features a lightweight permissions system based on datasets, groups, and users to ensure that only individuals to whom you've granted access can view your data.

Initial authorisation is purely via third party accounts (Social Login), ensuring that Earthwave does not store any of our users' personal data. Further information is available in our Privacy Policy.