Issue #142 Initial docs

docs/README.md

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+
+# The openEO Aggregator: federated openEO processing
+
+The openEO Aggregator is a software component to group multiple openEO back-ends together
+into a unified, federated openEO processing platform.
+
+
+## Background: openEO
+
+The [openEO API](https://openeo.org/) is an open, standardized API for Earth Observation data processing,
+connecting openEO-capable clients at the user side with openEO-capable back-ends at the (cloud) processing side.
+Not only does it decouple the clients requirements from the technology stack of the back-ends,
+it also allows the user or client to switch between back-ends with minimal or even no code changes.
+Multiple openEO back-end implementations have been developed and are available today,
+each based on different processing technologies and each providing a different set of data collections.
+
+The freedom to choose a back-end and avoiding lock-in is one of the key features of openEO,
+but it also implies that the user is required to make a choice, as there is no default back-end.
+Moreover, the user might want to combine data or processing functionality from different back-ends,
+which is not directly supported by openEO's core API.
+Note that Earth Observation data is fast-growing and diverse,
+making it unsafe to assume that a single provider will be able to host all EO data.
+
+## Federated openEO processing
+
+The "openEO Aggregator" project aims to address this problem through a proxy-like component to
+build a federated openEO processing platform.
+The openEO Aggregator allows to group multiple openEO back-ends together
+and to and expose their combined power as a single, openEO-compliant API endpoint to the user,
+including, but not limited to:
+
+- merging and unification of general resource metadata such as data collections and openEO processes
+- unified listing of batch jobs of a user across multiple back-ends
+- dispatching of simple processing requests (both for synchronous processing and batch jobs) to the appropriate back-end
+- handling of more complex processing requests that require data from multiple back-ends