The Scientific Toolboxes Exploitation Platform (STEP) platform, launched in June 2015 and administrated by CS ROMANIA, is the ESA community platform for accessing the SNAP software and its documentation, communicating with the developers, dialoguing within the science community, promoting results and achievements as well as providing tutorials and material for training scientists using the Toolboxes.
The SNAP software allows visualization and processing of various satellites data, easy access to Radar, Optical and Termal data exploitation for public users and it is free and open-source.
STEP consists in 3 main components:
- The public websites hosts the SNAP application installer, and other third-parties software which can be integrated in SNAP, together with video tutorials, valuable images obtained with SNAP and a news blog. The public website reached 250.000 visits and 110.000 SNAP downloads in two years after launch
- The forum supports technical discussions and community animations. The forum website is login-based and has gathered 2.500 users, 3.000 topics and 18.000 posts. The SNAP developers are active users of the forum, so the public users get help directly from them. The forum also gathered 1.1 Mil anonymous page views.
- The surveys website is used to receive user feedback in order to follow their needs in the development process.
The STEP platform was presented by CS ROMANIA at the important ESA events like 2nd EO Open Science Conference,12-14 Sep 2016 and ESA Earth Observation Summer School 1-12 August 2016, Earth Observation Open Science 2.0 12-14 Oct 2015.