Relation to other tools

There exists a logical, circular dependency between bigearthnet_common and this project. bigearthnet_gdf_builder uses functions from bigearthnet_common to safely read the BigEarthNet JSON metadata files from the Sentine-1/2 archives.

The resulting raw GeoDataFrame is further processed to the extended representation with extra metadata (season of the acquisition date, country, 19-class nomenclature, etc.).

To easily provide a dependency free interaction with BigEarthnet, mainly to quickly create subsets, some of these results are distributed in the bigearthnet_common package. For example, this allows a user to quickly retrieve the corresponding S2 patch of an S1 input patch without needing to access the JSON file or the result of the bigearthnet_gdf_builder.

The correctness of some bigearthnet_common functions depend on the correctness of this project! As such, bigearthnet_gdf_builder should never use functions from bigearthnet_common that make use of the distributed data.