Concept Of Digital Earth Research Articles

Цифровой правовой контроль как новая цивилистическая категория

Introduction: the article looks at digitalization of economy through the prism of the ‘new technological path’, Digital Earth concept, digital innovation in the framework of Industry 4.0. The focus is on the advantages and disadvantages of such digitalization from the perspective of digital legal control. In the light of the formulated thesis about the absence of a unified scientific idea of the place of digital legal control in the system of relations under private or public law, the author attempts to develop the fundamentals of the digital legal control concept, which is presented in the article as a new civil category. Purpose: to form a general idea of digital civil‐law control, its place in the system of types of digital legal control, and the areas of its practical implementation. Methods: general scientific methods used in the study include analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, abstraction, interpretation, comparison, etc.; special scientific methods comprise legal‐dogmatic, historical‐legal, comparative‐legal methods, interpretation of legal norms, and legal modeling. Results: digital legal control is a characteristic of both public‐ and private‐law relations. The article develops doctrinal definitions of ‘digital public‐law control’ and ‘digital private‐law control’. Conclusions: in the field of public law, digital legal control is most often associated with public digital financial control. Digital legal control inherent in a civil agreement executed via a smart contract is implemented with the use of mathematical algorithms, therefore such control can be carried out both by a person and without his direct participation; however, in both cases such control is predetermined by the technical framework of a specific information system. Classical contract law is based on trust of the property turnover participants in the state system of coercion, while digital contract law is characterized by trust of the parties to an agreement in the computer code.

Framing data science, analytics and statistics around the digital earth concept

AbstractEnvironmental data science can be shaped around the concepts of data streams (or the data deluge), and both data driven and process models. Together they lead to the concept of a digital earth. In this short opinion piece, I reflect on some of the challenges in truly realizing the digital earth concept.

Digital | Earth | observation

ABSTRACT The transforming world evokes changes in social, environmental, and economic dimensions, pushed by the digitalisation of many, if not all, aspects of our lives. Satellite Earth observation, while being “digital” from early on, has experienced a boost by digitalisation in recent years, with new trend s of cloud processing, data cube infrastructure, computer vision, machine learning, at unprecedented speeds. This Special Issue on “Digital | Earth | Observation” is dedicated to the fruitful interplay between the Digital Earth concept and Earth observation, embedded in the great technological trends in this field, and demonstrates how this potential can be used in various application contexts.

What is and What is not the Digital Earth

The article addresses to a fundamental issue facing the concept of the Digital Earth in 2020 – what is the definition of the Digital Earth? 22 years after the announcement of the concept and 15 years after its first mass and successful implementation in the service Google Earth in 2005 this question remains unanswered. In the article the current status of the development of the Digital Earth concept by 2020 is considered, a methodology for the definition of the Digital Earth, based on the classification of the diversity of existing geospatial approaches and the identification of key factors that provide its unique functionality, is proposed and discussed. Distinction between the Digital Earth and others geospatial approaches is provided. The intrinsic connection of definition and classifications is grounded, the new definition of the Digital Earth and complimentary classification of geospatial methods are offered. Semiotics aspects of the Digital Earth are discussed briefly. The question of the eligibility of technologies and systems to the Digital Earth is considered. The perspective issues of further development of the Digital Earth are considered.

Unlock and use EO/geospatial data for SDG by empowering stakeholder engagement in a transformed society

The mission goal of the Working Group for Sustainable Development Goals (WG4SDG) of the Hungarian Society of Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing (MFTTT) is to promote the use of the steadily developed Earth observation (EO) and geospatial data infrastructures (SDI) and services – considering as base elements of the Digital Earth concept -as supportive tools for many of the SDGs-related indicator monitoring and reporting. The engagement of the stakeholders from government, academia/education, private sector/industry and learned societies is a key issue also on national level. It is anticipated, the link with the forum of the EO industry represented by the Hungarian Space Cluster HUNSPACE will leverage the experiences of the EO and SDI communities. Similarly, the connection with the national geographic information (GI) association HUNAGI and international societies such as FIG, ISPRS, ICA and ISDE are vital for knowledge transfer.

Tecnologias da Informação Geográfica: um desafio no ensino da Geografia

O desenvolvimento tecnológico recente massificou o acesso e a manipulação de informação geográfica, tendo colocado os princípios do pensamento espacial e do raciocínio geográfico como uma competência chave do cidadão do século XXI. Neste contexto, e de forma a aproximar a Geografia escolar da conceção de Digital Earth, considera-se que a disciplina de Geografia encontra nas novas tecnologias de manuseamento da informação geográfica um conjunto de ferramentas educativas ao serviço do cumprimento dos objetivos desta área curricular.

Building bridges: experiences and lessons learned from the implementation of INSPIRE and e-reporting of air quality data in Europe

Abstract The collection, exchange and use of air quality data require diverse monitoring, processing and dissemination systems to work seamlessly together. These systems should supply data in a format usable for other applications such as planning, assessing population exposure and environmental impact assessment. As air quality does not change abruptly near national borders, international cooperation within this domain is highly desirable. This manuscript reports lessons learned during the implementation phase of one the world’s largest data harmonisation effort of environmental information infrastructures, INSPIRE, a backbone of a European wide spatial data reporting system which involves an unprecedented number of actors and volumes of data. It is important within the context of the Digital Earth concept and the establishment of a global spatial data infrastructure (SDI) through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), as the quality of ambient air is among the most pressing contemporary environmental problems. We summarise our findings from the perspective of national public authorities, obliged by law to transmit standardised spatio-temporal data to streamline reporting and facilitate the use of information, while keeping public expenditure under control. To develop implementation strategies for these type of e-reporting data flows we established a cross-border case study, looking at the process of harmonisation and exchange of data in Belgium and the Netherlands based on interoperable standards. Our results cover the legal, semantic, technological and organisational aspects of reporting. They are relevant to a cross-thematic audience having to undergo similar processes of reporting, such as climate change, environmental noise, marine, biodiversity, water management, etc.

From digital earth to digital neighbourhood: A study of subjective measures of walkability attributes in objectively assessed digital neighbourhood

According to IEA report (2011), about 23% of the World's CO2 emissions result from transport and this is one of the few areas where emissions are still rapidly increasing. The use of private vehicles is one of the principle contributors to green house gas emissions from transport sector. Therefore this paper focuses on the shift to more sustainable and low carbon forms of transportation mode such as walking. Neighbourhood built environment attributes may influence walkability. For this study, the author used a modified version of the "Neighbourhood Environment Walkability Scale" to make comparison between respondents' perceptions regarding attributes of two neighborhoods of Putrajaya. The 21st Century really needs planners to use the Digital Earth Concept, to go from global to regional to national to very local issues, using integrated, advanced technologies such as earth observation, GIS, virtual reality, etc. For this research, two (2) neighborhoods of different densities (High and Low density) were selected. A sample total of 381(195 and 186) between 7 to 65 years old participants were selected For subjective measures we used 54 questions questionnaire survey where as for the objective measures we used desktop 9.3 version of Arc GIS soft ware. Our results shows that respondents who reside in high-walkable neighbourhood precinct 9 in Putrajaya rated factors such as residential density, land use mix, proximity to destination and street connectivity, consistently higher then did respondents of the low walkable neighbourhood precinct 8 in Putrajaya.

Streamflow modelling by remote sensing: A contribution to digital Earth

Remote sensing contributes valuable information to streamflow estimates. This paper discusses its relevance to the digital earth concept. The authors categorize the role of remote sensing in streamflow modelling and estimation. This paper emphasizes the applications and challenges of satellite-based products in streamflow modelling. Importance and application of streamflow models is firstly described. Then, different classifications of models, modelling processes and several uncertainties sources that affect models prediction are explained. In addition, we explore the advantages of satellite precipitation estimates in modelling, uncertainties in remotely sensed data and some improvement techniques. The connection, relationship and contribution of remote sensing for streamflow modelling to digital earth principle are identified. Finally, we define and illustrate the future directions and necessary developments of streamflow measurement by remote sensing.

From digital Earth to smart Earth

This article will analyze the achievements of the digital Earth concept and further introduce two key technologies, the internet of things and cloud computing. Both these technologies are accelerating the development of digital Earth toward a new concept—smart Earth. The objective of this article is to discuss the architecture, infrastructure, and typical applications for smart Earth and to elaborate on trends of the movement from digital Earth to smart Earth.

Remote sensing image fusion: an update in the context of Digital Earth

Remote sensing image fusion has come a long way from research experiments to an operational image processing technology. Having established a framework for image fusion at the end of the 90s, we now provide an overview on the advances in image fusion during the past 15 years. Assembling information about new remote sensing image fusion techniques, recent technical developments and their influence on image fusion, international societies and working groups, and new journals and publications, we provide insight into new trends. It becomes clear that image fusion facilitates remote sensing image exploitation. It aims at achieving better and more reliable information to better understand complex Earth systems. The numerous publications during the last decade show that remote sensing image fusion is a well-established research field. The experiences gained foster other technological developments in terms of sensor configuration and data exploitation. Multi-modal data usage enables the implementation of the concept of Digital Earth. In order to advance in this respect, we recommend that updated guidelines and a set of commonly accepted quality assessment criteria are needed in image fusion.

A multistage collaborative 3D GIS to support public participation

This paper presents a collaborative 3D GIS to support public participation. Realizing that public-involved decision-making is often a multistage process, the proposed system is designed to provide coherent support for collaborations in the different stages. We differentiate ubiquitous participation and intensive participation and identify their suitable application stages. The proposed system, then, supports both of the two types of participation by providing synchronous and asynchronous collaboration functionalities. Applying the concept of Digital Earth, the proposed system also features a virtual globe-based user interface. Such an interface integrates a variety of data, functions, and services into a unified virtual environment which is delivered to both experts and public participants through the Internet. The system has been designed as a general software framework and can be tailored for specific projects. In this study, we demonstrate it using a scene modeling case and provide a preliminary evaluation toward its usability.

Digital Earth and Exploration of Military Application

Digital Earth is the inevitable product which is developed with the global information technology and international military competition, it is of great significance in modern warfare and national defense construction. This paper describes the concept of Digital Earth and the environment construction of military application of Digital Earth. At last, this paper focuses on Digital Earth applications and application status in the military.

The future of Digital Earth

The concept of Digital Earth as a digital replica of the planet has its roots in science fiction, in the writings of environmental visionaries, and in a speech prepared for delivery by Vice President Gore in 1998. Five use cases are identified that together comprise the vision of Digital Earth: a geoportal, a visualization service, a platform for simulation and prediction, a source of unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, and a technology fully integrated into human activities. Progress to date is reviewed for each use case, along with the research that would be needed to achieve each aspect of the overall vision.

A time series for monitoring vegetation activity and phenology at 10-daily time steps covering large parts of South America

It is widely accepted that natural resources should only be sustainably exploited and utilized to effectively preserve our planet for future generations. To better manage the natural resources, and to better understand the closely linked Earth systems, the concept of Digital Earth has been strongly promoted since US Vice President Al Gore's speech in 1998. One core element of Digital Earth is the use and integration of remote sensing data. Only satellite imagery can cover the entire globe repeatedly at a sufficient high-spatial resolution to map changes in land cover and land use, but also to detect more subtle changes related for instance to climate change. To uncover global change effects on vegetation activity and phenology, it is important to establish high quality time series characterizing the past situation against which the current state can be compared. With the present study we describe a time series of vegetation activity at 10-daily time steps between 1998 and 2008 covering large parts of South America at 1 km spatial resolution. Particular emphasis was put on noise removal. Only carefully filtered time series of vegetation indices can be used as a benchmark and for studying vegetation dynamics at a continental scale. Without temporal smoothing, subtle spatio-temporal patterns in vegetation composition, density and phenology would be hidden by atmospheric noise and undetected clouds. Such noise is immanent in data that have undergone solely a maximum value compositing. Within the present study, the Whittaker smoother (WS) was applied to a SPOT VGT time series. The WS balances the fidelity to the observations with the roughness of the smoothed curve. The algorithm is extremely fast, gives continuous control over smoothness with only one parameter, and interpolates automatically. The filtering efficiently removed the negatively biased noise present in the original data, while preserving the overall shape of the curves showing vegetation growth and development. Geostatistical variogram analysis revealed a significantly increased signal-to-noise ratio compared to the raw data. Analysis of the data also revealed spatially consistent key phenological markers. Extracted seasonality parameters followed a clear meridional trend. Compared to the unfiltered data, the filtered time series increased the separability of various land cover classes. It is thus expected that the data set holds great potential for environmental and vegetation related studies within the frame of Digital Earth.

Challenges in geographical information science

Geographical information science can be defined as that branch of information science that deals with the geographical domain, or as the set of fundamental scientific questions raised by geographical information and the technologies that collect, manipulate and communicate it. Geographical information can reveal interesting patterns that point in some cases to causal mechanisms. The use of Global Positioning Systems and online services has led to numerous rich sources of real-time data, and to the empowerment of the average citizen as a maker of maps, an empowerment that is especially valuable during emergencies when a dense network of citizens can potentially replace the services of scarce and expensive mapping experts. The concept of Digital Earth was defined more than a decade ago and has since been realized in several virtual-globe services that employ hierarchical data structures to support rapid pan and zoom. Research over the past two decades has led to the identification of a series of fundamental empirical principles that are broadly true of all geographical information, and that provide the basis for the design of geographical databases and analytical methods. Rapid deployment of geographical information technologies raises a series of social issues, including privacy, that are likely to become more threatening in the future. The paper ends with a summary of some of the core challenges and future of geographical information science.

The role of GI-supported methods in crisis management

Crisis and disaster management has become an important research field in GIS during recent years. Risk assessment and situation picture-related work are particularly important areas of interest. There are distinct phases in different crises; these can be roughly divided into mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In this paper a general classification of methods in each phase is given with examples on recent or ongoing research projects. The framework is based on literature and experiences from crisis and disaster-related exercises. Three case studies are based on those exercises. The goal is to clarify the role and usability of various GI-supported methods in the crisis management process by outlining a theoretical framework and presenting examples of the developed methods. Continuously increasing amount of spatially related geographic information is a huge potential to the GI analysis and modeling methods; the concept of digital earth is the underlying mainstream that gives lots of promise to the research and development work in this field.

Challenges of the Sensor Web for disaster management

Sensor Web has been widely promoted and its application has evolved from original military usages to current ubiquitous civil and commercial applications. Its emergence has become a great strength to facilitate the Digital Earth concept. Although many Sensor Web applications and methods have been proposed to assist disaster management, they are not well suited to the unique features and application requirements of disaster management. Most researches focus on how to use the Sensor Web to monitor a certain phenomenon before a disaster happens and to provide early warning. However, there is a lack of study on the negative effects that a disaster may bring to the Sensor Web. For example, severe weather conditions, damaged infrastructure, and spatial isolation may directly make the Sensor Web out-of-service. Besides, disaster management is a complex subject and its domain knowledge needs to be clarified. In this paper, the domain of the disaster management is explored and its unique features are analyzed. Then the Sensor Web concept and its role in disaster management are explained. Afterwards, the challenges of the Sensor Web for disaster management and the possible solutions are discussed. Based on the above, we introduce a high-mobility emergency system to demonstrate a good solution of the Sensor Web for multi-purpose disaster management.

A novel confidence estimation method for neural networks in multispectral image classification

The Digital Earth concept has attracted much attention recently and this approach uses a variety of earth observation data from the global to the local scale. Imaging techniques have made much progress technically and the methods used for automatic extraction of geo-ralated information are of importance in Digital Earth science. One of these methods, artificial neural networks (ANN) techniques, have been effectively used in classification of remotely sensed images. Generally image classification with ANN has been producing higher or equal mapping accuracies than parametric methods. Comparative studies have, in fact, shown that there is no discernible difference in classification accuracies between neural and conventional statistical approaches. Only well designed and trained neural networks can present a better performance than the standard statistical approaches. There are, as yet, no widely recognised standard methods to implement an optimum network. From this point of view it might be beneficial to quantify ANN's reliability in classification problems. To measure the reliability of the neural network might be a way of developing to determine suitable network structures. To date, the problem of confidence estimation of ANN has not been studied in remote sensing studies. A statistical method for quantifying the reliability of a neural network that can be used in image classification is investigated in this paper. For this purpose the method is to be based on a binomial experimentation concept to establish confidence intervals. This novel method can also be used for the selection of an appropriate network structure for the classification of multispectral imagery. Although the main focus of the research is to estimate confidence in ANN, the approach might also be applicable and relevant to Digital Earth technologies.

Three-dimensional visualization simulation assessment system based on multi-source data fusion for the Wenchuan earthquake

We have developed a visual three-dimensional simulation and assessment system of the Wenchuan earthquake zone using the Digital Earth concept and highly efficient spatial information visualization technology. Our goal is to provide a foundation for earthquake disaster relief and reconstruction. A number of major collapses, landslides, mud-rock flows and other geological disasters are analysed in the system, and the system can be used to monitor and analyse earthquake relief, rescue and insurance to provide first-hand source material for disaster situation assessment. Multi-sensor, multi-temporal, multi-resolution remote sensing data and multi-scale DEM data are integrated into this system, and produce a sequence of comprehensive resolution datasets. We present management methods for a dynamic multi-resolution terrain model and multi-level scene. These methods are based on the model division, delaminating algorithm, and make use of high-speed buffering mechanisms to achieve a multi-level large-scale real-time rendering of scenes in the disaster areas, which also effectively reduces the rendering delay, and achieves smooth, seamless roaming at different model levels.