Digital Ocean Technological Advances

Abstract

Digital Ocean (DO) is a new research domain of Digital Earth. Because of the spatio-temporal, three-dimensional and intrinsically dynamic nature of ocean data, it is more difficult to make a breakthrough in this domain. In this chapter, the DO technological advances were introduced in detail. Firstly, the technological advances for DO from six aspects. (1) Introduction to DO data sources, which comprise Digital Elevation Model data of the seafloor and coast, in situ observational data, remote sensing data, computational model results and data stored in databases or other medium. (2) The three-dimensional ocean data integration platform. (3) The dynamic tide data visualization. (4) Remote sensing information products integration and sharing. (5) Computational ocean model data integration and service. (6) Spatio-temporal model of marine disasters. Secondly, the DO system initial architecture was introduced, which include the data acquire layer, standard data layer, data service layer, function layer, and application layer, respectively. Thirdly, a case study of DO was introduced, which include the China Digital Ocean Prototype System and the DE in support of an online oceanic educational public service and popularization system named iOcean. At last, the future work relating to DO should be carried out in the seven research areas were introduced as follows. (1) Aiding integrative oceanic scientific research. (2) Constructing regional DO systems. (3) Studying multiple spatio-temporal scales of ocean factors. (4) Studying the relationship between ocean elements at different times. (5) Studying the spatial relationship between different ocean elements or components. (6) Studying the architecture of the DO. (7) Studying the coastal river basin non-point pollution landscape source and assemblage pattern remote sensing parsing.