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The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 2Lstcentury

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The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 2Lstcentury The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in the 2lStCentury A new wave of technological inno- "desktop metaphor" employed by the about French history, perusing digi- vation is allowing us to capture, store, Macintosh and Windows operating sys- tized maps overlaid on the surface of process and display an unprec- tems, are not really suited to this new the Digital Earth, newsreel footage, edented amount of information about challenge. I believe we need a "Digital oral history, newspapers and other our planet and a wide variety of envi- Earth". A multi-resolution, three-di- primary sources. She sends some of ronmental and cultural phenomena. mensional representation of the planet, this information to her personal e- Much of this information will be " into which we can embed vast quanti- mail address to study later. The time- georeferenced" - that is, it will refer ties of geo-referenced data. line, which stretches off in the dis- to some specific place on the Earth's Imagine, for example, a young tance, can be set for days, years, surface. child going to a Digital Earth exhibit centuries, or even geological epochs, The hard part of taking advantage at a local museum. After donning a for those occasions when she wants to of this flood of geospatial information head-mounted display, she sees Earth learn more about dinosaurs. will be making sense of it. - turning as it appears from space. Using a data Obviously, no one organization in raw data into understandable infor- glove, she zooms in, using higher and government, industry or academia mation. Today, we often find that we higher levels of resolution, to see con- could undertake such a project. Like have more information than we know tinents, then regions, countries, cit- the World Wide Web, it would require what to do with. The Landsat pro- ies, and finally individual houses, the grassroots efforts of hundreds of gram, designed to help us understand trees, and other natural and man- thousands of individuals, companies, the global environment, is a good ex- made objects. Having found an area of university researchers, and govern- ample. The Land-sat satellite is ca- the planet she is interested in explor- ment organizations. Although some of pable of taking a complete photo- ing, she takes the equivalent of a the data for the Digital Earth would graph of the entire planet every two "magic carpet ride" through a 3-D vi- be in the public domain, it might also weeks, and it's been collecting data sualization of the terrain. Of course, become a digital marketplace for for more than 20 years. In spite of the terrain is only one of the many kinds companies selling a vast array of great need for that information, the of data with which she can interact. commercial imagery and value-added vast majority of those images have Using the systems' voice recognition information services. It could also be- never fired a single neuron in a single capabilities, she is able to request in- come a "col1aboratory"- a laboratory human brain. Instead, they are stored formation on land cover, distribution without walls - for research scien- in electronic silos of data. We used to of plant and animal species, real- tists seeking to understand the com- have an agricultural policy where we time weather, roads, political bound- plex interaction between humanity stored grain in Midwestern silos and aries, and population. She can also and our environment. let it rot while millions of people visualize the environmental informa starved to death. Now we have an in- tion that she and other students all TWndogbs Nseded far a satiable hunger for knowledge. Yet a over the world have collected as par m- great deal of data remains unused. of the GLOBE project. This informa- Although this scenario may seem Part of the problem has to do with tion can be seamlessly fused with the like science fiction, most of the tech- the way information is displayed. digital map or terrain data. She can nologies and capabilities that would Someone once said that if we tried to get more information on many of the be required to build a Digital Earth describe the human brain in computer objects she sees by using her data are either here or under development. terms, it looks as if we have a low bit glove to click on a hyperlink. To pre- Of course, the capabilities of a Digital rate, but very high resolution. For ex- pare for her family's vacation to Earth will continue to evolve over ample, researchers have long known Yellowstone National Park, for ex- time. What we will be able to do in that we have trouble remembering more ample, she plans the perfect hike to 2005 will look primitive compared to than seven pieces of data in our short- the geysers, bison, and bighorn sheep the Digital Earth of the year 2020. Be- term memory. That's a low bit rate. On that she has just read about. In fact, low are just a few of the technologies the other hand, we can absorb billions she can follow the trail visually from that are needed: of bits of information instantly if they start to finish before she ever leaves Computational Science: Until the are arrayed in a recognizable pattern the museum in her hometown. advent of computers, both experimen- within which each bit gains meaning She is not limited to moving tal and theoretical ways of creating in relation to all the others - a human through space, but can also travel knowledge have been limited. Many face, or a galaxy of stars. through time. After taking a virtual of the phenomena that experimental The tools we have most commonly field-trip to Paris to visit the Louvre, scientists would like to study are too used to interact with data, such as the she moves backward in time to learn hard to observe - they may be too 528 May 1999 PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING small or too large, too fast or too slow, points in public places like children' nas, California has reduced youth occurring in a billionth of a second or museums and science museums. handgun violence by using CIS to de- over a billion years. Pure theory, on btem~erabih:The Internet and tect crime patterns and gang activity. the other hand, cannot predict the the world wide web have silcceeded By collecting information on the dis- outcomes of complex natural phe- because of tbe, emergence of a few, tribution and frequency of criminal nomena like thunderstorms or air simple) widely agreed upon prot-16, activities, the city has been able to flows over airplanes. But with high- such = the htmt~tml. The Digi- quickly redeploy police resources. speed computers as a new tool, we tal Earth wLli idso heed some level of Preserving biodiversity: Planning can simulate phenomena that are im- interoperability, $0 that geographical agencies in the campPendelton, possible to observe, and simulta- information %enwedby one kind of California region predict that popula- neously better understand data from application softwm can be read by an- tion will grow from 1.1 million in observations. In this way, computa- other. The GIs industry is seeking to 1990 to 1.6 million in 2010. This re- tional science allows us to overcome address many of these ksues through gion contains over 200 plants and the limitations of both experimental the Open GIS Cosdum. animals that are listed by federal or and theoretical science. Modeling Metadata: Metadata is "data about state agencies as endangered, threat and simulation will give us new in- data-" For imagery Or other georefer- ened, or rare. By collecting informa- sights into the data that we are col- enced information to be helpful, it tion on terrain, soil type, annual rain- lecting about our planet. might be necwarY to know its name, fall, vegetation, land use, and Mass Storage: The Digital Earth location, author or some, date, data ownership, scientists modeled the will require storing quadrillions of format, resolution, etc. The Federal impact on biodiversity of different re- bytes of information. Later this year, Geographic Data Committee is work- gional growth plan~. NASA's Mission to Planet Earth pro- ing with industry and state and local Predicting climate change: One of gram will generate a terrabyte of in- government to develop voluntary the significant unknowns in modeling formation each day. Fortunately, we standards for metadata. climate change is the global rate of are continuing to make dramatic im- Of course, ffirthsr technological deforestation . By analyzing satellite provements in this area. Progress is needed to ~edizethe full imagery, researchers at the University Satellite Imagery: The Administra- potential of the Digital Earth, espe- of New Hampshire, working with col- tion has licensed commercial satellites cially in such as automatic in- leagues in Brazil, are able to monitor systems that will provide 1-meter reso- terpretation of imaf$fd~y,the fusion of changes in land cover and thus deter- lution imagery beginning in early 1998. data from multiple murces, and intel- mine the rate and location of defores- This provides a level of accuracy suffi- ligent agents that could find and link tation in the Amazon. This technique cient for detailed maps, and that was information on the Web &bouta par- is now being extended to other for- previously only available using aerial ticular spot cpn the p~~~t.But enough ested areas in the world. photography. This technology, origi- of the pieces asff, in $qce right now to Increasing agricultural prodnctiv- nally developed in the U.S. intelli- warrant ~mcwangwfth &is exciting ity: Farmers are already beginning to gence community, is incredibly accu- initiative.
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