DELIVERABLES

This deliverable document reports on the technical and scientific validation of the ERMES Regional Products and Information Services.The aim of this document is to detail the validation conducted during the 2016 rice season in the following regional products:

• ERMES Product Regional 1: Rice crop maps
• ERMES Product Regional 2: Phenological maps
• ERMES Product Regional 3: Multitemporal Leaf Area Index maps
• ERMES Product Regional 4: Regional meteorological maps
• ERMES Information Services

In this deliverable, we summarize relevant verification and validation methods of ERMES services as described in D8.5, outline the verification and validation plan both for software units (geospatial web services, database web services, server-side scripts and catalogue services) and for ERMES tools (AgriNoteBook, local and regional geoportal) as described in D8.5 [9], and repeat the verification and validation methods already performed up to the end of 2015. Subsequently, we complement these with the additional verification and validation methods performed in 2016, and give a complete overview of the verification and validation methods performed throughout the software lifecycle, indicating their desirability (optional - O, recommended - R) and status (not performed - N, partially completed - P, completed - C).

Task 8.1 The activities of the ERMES Task 8.1 are focused on the overall validation of the ERMES Local Products and Services, in terms of their accuracy and quality as assessed through independent means. The results of this analysis are necessary for assessing the products’ usefulness from the end-users’ point of view, but also serves as means to identify possible improvements that can be incorporated into the respective processing chains.

Task 8.2: Technological and scientific validation of Regional service inputs and outputs. This deliverable reports preliminary results of Task 8.3 “Validation of smart mobile and web services”, as part of the WP 8 (Scientific and technical validation of product and services). WP8 is composed of three main tasks. While the first two are centered on the validation of data products, either at regional or local scale, software products are the focus in T8.3. As the focus of validation differs greatly among T 8.1/8.2 and T8.3, the validation strategies and approaches taken will do so as well. The present document considers the term “validation” as used in system and software engineering and development, i.e., applied to software products.

Task 8.2 includes different validation activities conducted in each ERMES regional product and information service such as setting up of protocols for validation, in situ data collection, and evaluation metrics for products generated exploiting processing chains developed by the different groups.