Digital Earth SIB Council (SIB-DE)

Keywords:

• Access to digital information, Geospatial Information, Computer graphics, Information Visualization, Scientific visualization, Web-based repositories, Digital libraries

Scope

The concept of Digital Earth (DE) dates back to 31 January 1998 when Al Gore, at the time vice president of the USA, gave one of his most well-renowned speeches at the California Science Center in Los Angeles titled: “The Digital Earth: Understanding our planet in the 21st Century”.

The concept of DE is based on interaction with a virtual representation of the Earth as the interface to access digital information of various nature including, but not limited to, geographical data but also, and most relevantly, 3D models, web-based repositories, images, videos, and document repositories are associated to a geographical location.

Mission

The rapid development of a number of technologies to acquire, process, manage and transmit Geospatial Information (GI), has substantially transformed how experts and common people altogether deal with this data. The concept of Digital Earth, pursued by 3D geobrowsers, is suddenly opening the field of geospatial information, via the Internet, to the broad public creating the conditions for a countless list of Web 2.0 applications.

This evolution is bringing to a number of challenging implications at technological and societal level and this SIB will gather a community of stakeholders to envisage the new generation of Digital Earth solutions and to explore how new methodologies and technologies can be used in the widest number of scenarios.  The goal is to promote the development of a new generation of internet services that can address a number of challenging goals, including better provision of environmental analysis, improvement of our security, creation if new economic opportunities and, more generally, positively contributing to the enrichment, both economic and cultural, of our societies.

Key challenges

• Creating new ways of experiencing and sharing heterogeneous digital information according to their spatial reference.
• Transforming the way user discovery of data.
• Promoting a new generation of anticipatory, context-aware and custom-tailored IT solutions.
• Bringing a radical advancement in the way we conceive knowledge modeling and processing far beyond current data lifecycle.
• Promoting effective problem-solving, inquiry–based approaches to deal with digital information.
• Promote development of Digital Earth solutions to increase the user’s awareness on a number of social, economic and industrial issues.

Description

Traditionally, the possibility to extract and retrieve knowledge and from digital information has related to the so-called semantic web. Traditionally information is processed and stored, on the basis of metadata available for a given object. This approach improves the traditional query-based retrieval of information. However the recent popularity enjoyed by geospatial software such as Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth or NASA World Wind, is creating new ways of experiencing and sharing heterogeneous digital information according to their spatial reference in the real world. This has rapidly brought a profound paradigm shift whereby users access a variety of digital information from within a 3D environment which reproduces the Earth.

This paradigm shift, which follows the initially visionary concept of Digital Earth, is based on interaction with  a virtual representation of the Earth as the interface to access digital information of various nature where not only standard GIS data but also, and most relevantly, 3D models, web-based repositories, images, videos, and document repositories are associated to a geographical location.

This approach is clearly transforming the way user discovery of data, which is now based on their location, and it is bringing to a brand new generation of commercial and community services both for professional and personal use. Such a radical shift in demand is having profound social effects contributing to the growth of a number of social communities of prosumers (producers and consumers) of geo-referenced digital content. This social phenomenon, often referred to as “neogeography”^[1] is bringing to an increasingly large amount of geo-tagged information generated by user communities.

Within this scenario the world itself is becoming a more intelligent environment, opening up radically new scenarios of globalised intelligent applications capable to benefit from heterogeneous distributed information on the spatial environment surrounding us. These include data from spatial databases, web-based repositories, a large variety of real-time information continuously delivered by ground sensors and by satellite-born technologies and, last but not least, an increasingly large amount of geo-referenced information generated by user communities which are available on the web.

This information-rich scenario will be at the base of a number of intelligent services essential to numerous daily activities. In fact, in our everyday lives, we already make extensive use of Geospatial Technologies and of Geographic Information (GI) in a number of applications which today are regarded as a commodity, including personal navigation systems; media-rich web 2.0 “mash-ups”, using a variety of mapping APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) as components of larger modular web 2.0 applications; 3D web-based applications, known as 3D Geobrowsers or “spinning globes”. In fact in our daily practice we are already used to a number of web-based applications delivering real-time geo-referenced information for instance on road traffic and congestion, on localized weather forecast, on pollution distribution. We constantly use geographical information and personal satellite navigation technologies for pedestrian and vehicle navigation and routing systems, to find the closest shop or to track the path of a user playing outdoor sports.

Furthermore it becomes now possible to extend technologies, originally created within the boundaries of enclosed spaces, for scenarios such as home automation, health care and elderly assistance, to a much wider perspective which is embracing the wider environment that surrounds us. By pursuing the vision of Digital Earth a new generation of anticipatory, context-aware and custom-tailored IT solutions will have to be developed to respond to an enlarged number of case studies, far beyond enclosed spatial domains such as home or office. Extensive use of hardware technologies such as RFID, sensor networks, wireless communications as well as software techniques including software agents, affective computing paradigms or human-centered interfaces can all be exploited to release new applications, traditionally confined to indoor scenarios, to well-controlled outdoor contexts.

Additionally the use of Digital Earth is extremely relevant to the context of environmental management and planning. Operators need to be able to access data on the ecosystem, to perform spatial analysis of environmental data, to extract environmental indicators of interest. For this reason it is essential to provide them with the most effective tools, based on the concept of Digital Earth, to ensure the best possible management of the environment as well as to ensure the wellbeing of those living within it. In fact it is important to provide operators with technologies to access, manage, process GI from basic cartographic data, to information on wildlife, population and pollutant distribution, to classification of industrial sites as well as localization of other anthropogenic activities. The type of data being managed may include among other, high-resolution areal or satellite imagery, digital raster or vector maps, alphanumerical information on economic, social, demographic indicators, real-time sensor data on pollution to name but a few.

However this far sighted approach requires a radical advancement in the way we conceive knowledge modelling and processing far beyond current data lifecycle. Being able to formalize a wider range of characteristics within the way information is encoded would ultimately significantly contribute to better integration of business processes as well as knowledge management systems. The possibility to access, search and interact with such a behavior-rich digital environment would certainly contribute to improve user’s level of engagement promoting effective problem-solving, inquiry–based approaches to deal with digital information. However this requires a true multi-disciplinary approach since it requires new visualization and interaction technologies, evolved interaction metaphors, new ways of exploiting the way information is structured and modeled from both a geometrical and semantic point of view.

In fact this new approach, based on Digital Earth paradigm, can be of fundamental importance within next generation education and training systems. To this extent, being able to interact, within an interactive three dimensional environment, with virtual objects which have a reference to real world and specific behaviours can pave the ground to reshape the way we learn.

Technology area: SIB on GeoVisual Analytics (GVA)