A European perspective on Digital Earth

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the definition of a European perspective on Digital Earth (DE), identify some actions that can contribute to raise the awareness of DE in the European context and thus strengthen the European contribution to the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE). The paper identifies opportunities and synergies with the current policy priorities in Europe (Europe 2020, Innovation Union and Digital Agenda) and highlights a number of key areas to advance the development of DE from a European perspective: (1) integrating scientific research into DE; (2) exploiting the Observation Web with human-centred sensing; and (3) governance, including the establishment of stronger linkages across the European landscape of funding streams and initiatives. The paper is offered also as a contribution to the development of this new vision of DE to be presented at the next International DE Conference in Perth, Australia, in August 2011. The global recognition of this new vision will then reinforce the European component and build a positive feedback loop for the further implementation of DE across the globe.     

Spatial prediction of rainfall-induced shallow landslides using hybrid integration approach of Least-Squares Support Vector Machines and differential evolution optimization: a case study in Central Vietnam

This study represents a hybrid intelligence approach based on the differential evolution optimization and Least-Squares Support Vector Machines for shallow landslide prediction, named as DE–LSSVM_SLP. The LSSVM is used to establish a landslide prediction model whereas the DE is adopted to search the optimal tuning parameters of the LSSVM model. In this research, a GIS database with 129 historical landslide records in the Quy Hop area (Central Vietnam) has been collected to establish the hybrid model. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC) were used to assess the performance of the newly constructed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model has high performances with approximately 82% of AUCs on both training and validating datasets. The model’s results were compared with those obtained from other methods, Support Vector Machines, Multilayer Perceptron Neural Networks, and J48 Decision Trees. The result comparison demonstrates that the DE–LSSVM_SLP deems best suited for the dataset at hand; therefore, the proposed model can be a promising tool for spatial prediction of rainfall-induced shallow landslides for the study area.     

Calibration of cellular automata models using differential evolution to simulate present and future land use

A key issue in cellular automata (CA) modeling is the minimization of the differences between the actual and simulated patterns, which can be mathematically formulated as an objective function. We develop a new hybrid model (termed DE‐CA) by integrating differential evolution (DE) into CA to solve the objective function and retrieve the optimal CA parameters. Constrained relations among factors were applied in DE to generate different sets of CA parameters for prediction of future scenarios. The DE‐CA model was calibrated using historical spatial data to simulate 2016 land use in Kunming and predict multiple scenarios to the year 2026. Assessment of quantitative accuracy shows that DE‐CA yields 92.4% overall accuracy, where 6.8% is the correctly captured urban growth; further, the model reported only 5.0% false alarms and 2.6% misses. Regarding the simulation ability, our new CA model performs as well as the widely applied genetic algorithm‐based CA model, and outperforms both the logistic regression‐based CA model and a no‐change NULL model. We projected three possible scenarios for the year 2026 using DE‐CA to adequately address the baseline urban growth, environmental protection and urban planning to show the strong prediction ability of the new model.     

数字地球与“地相学”

本文通过对数字地球的诠释,结合与地相学的本质联系,论述了二者的形成与发展的关联程度,提出了数字地球是地相学的“量化”;地相学是数字地球的理论支撑与生存、发展的土壤,也是数字地球的学科定位“解”。进而,阐明数字时空的实现是数字地球更宽泛的归宿。     

Classification of topological relations between spatial objects in two‐dimensional space within the dimensionally extended 9‐intersection model

As an important topological relation model, the dimensionally extended 9‐intersection model (DE‐9IM) has been widely used as a basis for standards of queries in spatial databases. However, the negative conditions for the specification of the topological relations within the DE‐9IM have not been studied. The specification of the topological relations is closely related to the definition of the spatial objects and the topological relation models. The interior, boundary, and exterior of the spatial objects, including the point, line, and region, are defined. Within the framework of the DE‐9IM, 43 negative conditions are proposed to eliminate impossible topological relations. Configurations of region/region, region/line, line/line, region/point, line/point, and point/point relations are drawn. The mutual exclusion of the negative conditions is discussed, and the topological relations within the framework of 9IM and DE‐9IM are compared. The results show that: (1) impossible topological relations between spatial objects can be eliminated by the application of 43 negative conditions; and (2) 12 relations between two regions, 31 relations between a region and a line, 47 relations between two lines, three relations between a region and a point, three relations between a line and a point, and two relations between two points can be distinguished by the DE‐9IM.     

Distributed geospatial information processing: sharing distributed geospatial resources to support Digital Earth

Abstract

This paper introduces a new concept, distributed geospatial information processing (DGIP), which refers to the process of geospatial information residing on computers geographically dispersed and connected through computer networks, and the contribution of DGIP to Digital Earth (DE). The DGIP plays a critical role in integrating the widely distributed geospatial resources to support the DE envisioned to utilise a wide variety of information. This paper addresses this role from three different aspects: 1) sharing Earth data, information, and services through geospatial interoperability supported by standardisation of contents and interfaces; 2) sharing computing and software resources through a GeoCyberinfrastructure supported by DGIP middleware; and 3) sharing knowledge within and across domains through ontology and semantic searches. Observing the long-term process for the research and development of an operational DE, we discuss and expect some practical contributions of the DGIP to the DE.     

Evaluation and Monitoring of Service Quality: Discussing Ways to Meet INSPIRE Requirements

Service oriented architectures (SOA) are widely used nowadays. As the name implies such architectures rely on services. Germany developed a marine‐specific service oriented data infrastructure (MDI‐DE – Marine Dateninfrastruktur Deutschland) from 2010 to 2013. The services in MDI‐DE can contribute to fulfilling reporting commitments for various European and national legislation. The services of MDI‐DE (just like other services affected, for instance, by INSPIRE) have to meet specific requirements regarding performance, availability and conformity (quality of service, QoS). Although SOA is an important field in scientific research there are very few publications and studies available on QoS, especially regarding INSPIRE requirements. The services of MDI‐DE were analyzed using various existing tools. Their usefulness to reflect where either the aspect's performance, availability or conformity needs improvement was partly verified. Due to varying results and the neglect of some services for various reasons it can be stated that the more tools are used, the more conclusive the outcome. Furthermore, service quality was not coherent when measured with different tools. This means that measuring QoS in terms of INSPIRE will be very difficult to do in the future and there is the danger that people will choose the tools with which their services perform best.     

用ANUDEM建立水文地貌关系正确DEM的方法研究

针对区域尺度的径流、水土流失定量评价和植被适宜性评价等研究工作需要,利用1∶25万数字地形图和ANUDEM软件,对黄土丘陵区中等分辨率水文地貌关系正确DEM建立方法进行了研究。结果表明该方法所建立的DEM,可以正确反映地貌梁、沟结构及其与流水线网络的关系,对地形描述的能力优于TIN方法建立的DEM;利用ANUDEM和1∶25万地形图插值建立黄土丘陵区DEM的三个主要参数分别为分辨率50或100,计算迭代次数40,第二糙率系数0.8。     

数字地球建设中的地理空间Metadata研究

为解决数字地球建设中现有海量地理空间信息的共建共享,有效管理和利用,结合国际地理空间Metadata标准规范,对数字地球建设中所需的地理空间Metadata的定义,作用,分类,内容,实现模型与实例及其应用进行详细研究和设计,提出用于数字地球建设的地理空间Metadata网络管理系统解决方案,并设计实现了原型系统,为数字地球建设中现有海量地理空间信息的有效管理和共建共享提供了理论基础和切实可行的技术支撑。对国家空间信息基础设施建设和数字地球建设具有重要的推动作用和深远的社会意义。     

Reconstruction of One-Dimensional Dielectric Scatterers Using Differential Evolution and Particle Swarm Optimization

A comparison between differential evolution (DE) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) in solving 1-D small-scale inverse scattering problems is presented. In this comparison, the efficiency of both aforementioned optimization techniques is examined for permittivity and conductivity profile reconstruction problems. The comparison is carried out under the same conditions of initial population of candidate solutions and number of iterations. Numerical results indicate that both optimization methods are reliable tools for inverse scattering applications even when noisy measurements are considered. In the particular case of small-scale problems investigated in this letter, DE outperforms the PSO in terms of reconstruction accuracy. This is considered an indicative result and not generally applicable.     

Free and open source software for geospatial applications (FOSS4G) to support Future Earth

ABSTRACT

The development, integration, and distribution of the information and spatial data infrastructure (i.e. Digital Earth; DE) necessary to support the vision and goals of Future Earth (FE) will occur in a distributed fashion, in very diverse technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and economic contexts around the world. This complex context and ambitious goals require bringing to bear not only the best minds, but also the best science and technologies available. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications (FOSS4G) offers mature, capable and reliable software to contribute to the creation of this infrastructure. In this paper we point to a selected set of some of the most mature and reliable FOSS4G solutions that can be used to develop the functionality required as part of DE and FE. We provide examples of large-scale, sophisticated, mission-critical applications of each software to illustrate their power and capabilities in systems where they perform roles or functionality similar to the ones they could perform as part of DE and FE. We provide information and resources to assist the readers in carrying out their own assessments to select the best FOSS4G solutions for their particular contexts and system development needs.     

Digital Earth from vision to practice: making sense of citizen-generated content

Abstract

The vision of Digital Earth (DE) put recently forward under the auspices of the International Society for DE extends the paradigm of spatial data infrastructures by advocating an interactive and dynamic framework based on near-to-real time information from sensors and citizens. This paper contributes to developing that vision and reports the results of a two-year research project exploring the extent to which it is possible to extract information useful for policy and science from the large volumes of messages and photos being posted daily through social networks. Given the noted concerns about the quality of such data in relation to that provided by authoritative sources, the research has developed a semi-automatic workflow to assess the fitness for purpose of data extracted from Twitter and Flickr, and compared them to that coming from official sources, using forest fires as a case study. The findings indicate that we were able to detect accurately six of eight major fires in France in the summer of 2011, with another four detected by the social networks but not reported by our official source, the European Forest Fire Information Service. These findings and the lessons learned in handling the very large volumes of unstructured data in multiple languages discussed in this study provide useful insights into the value of social network data for policy and science, and contribute to advancing the vision of DE.     

Public Participation GIS: a FOSS architecture enabling field-data collection

Driven by the rise of Web 2.0 and the non-stop spread of mobile device sensors, the concept of Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) is knowing a revolutionary era which perfectly fits the new vision of Digital Earth (DE). This research investigates the opportunity to build up a PPGIS prototype with completely Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) architecture, in which data directly come from field surveys carried out by users. A sample application related to urban monitoring is addressed, which concentrates on user field-collected data concerning reports of road pavement damages. Open Data Kit suite allows users to collect geotagged multimedia information using mobile devices with onboard location sensors (e.g. a Global Positioning System receiver). On field-captured data are sent to a server and stored into a PostgreSQL database with PostGIS spatial extension. GeoServer then disseminates data on the Web. On the client-side, different solutions allow data visualization on both desktop computers and mobile devices. The designed architecture provided support for FOSS usage in the process of gathering, uploading, and Web publishing information collected in situ. The implementation of the developed PPGIS could thus substantially increase public active participation in data creation and sharing, besides enlarging DE knowledge up to the local level.     

导航卫星自主定轨中JPL DE星历的简化使用

导航卫星自主定轨中使用原始JPL DE星历不仅数据量较大,而且不容易编码。文中提出了一种简化的星历使用方法,利用对一定间隔的日月位置进行拉格朗日插值,取代原始星历的切比雪夫多项式拟合方法,可以有效减少上行传递的参数个数。通过实验分析得出,在60 d的自主定轨中使用间隔1 d的月球位置和10 d的太阳位置进行插值,可以在保证导航卫星自主定轨精度的基础上,参数个数从404/808个减少为254个。     

利用σ_z(τ)方法对脉冲星时与原子时长期稳定度对比分析

首次研究了毫秒脉冲星PSR J1939+2134共7.5a的双频计时残差序列的特征,通过分析不同行星星历对脉冲星计时精度的影响,建议使用DE421;采用σz(τ)方法估计了脉冲星时与原子时的稳定度,发现脉冲星时的稳定度一直处于上升趋势,6a高于10-15。由此可见,脉冲星时作为守时和授时的时间标准具有优势。     

论天地一体化的大测绘--地球空间信息学

阐述了天地一体化地球空间信息学的特点,从时空信息获取、加工、管理和服务几个方面进行论述。文中指出,时空信息获取将走向天地一体和全球化,时空信息加工与处理将走向自动化、智能化和实时化,时空信息管理和分发将走向网格化,而时空信息服务将趋向大众化,并可拉动地理信息产业的形成和发展。基于这些特点,展望了天地一体化大测绘概念下国家测绘局的地位与作用。     

Harnessing the power of immersive virtual reality - visualization and analysis of 3D earth science data sets

ABSTRACT

The availability and quantity of remotely sensed and terrestrial geospatial data sets are on the rise. Historically, these data sets have been analyzed and quarried on 2D desktop computers; however, immersive technologies and specifically immersive virtual reality (iVR) allow for the integration, visualization, analysis, and exploration of these 3D geospatial data sets. iVR can deliver remote and large-scale geospatial data sets to the laboratory, providing embodied experiences of field sites across the earth and beyond. We describe a workflow for the ingestion of geospatial data sets and the development of an iVR workbench, and present the application of these for an experience of Iceland’s Thrihnukar volcano where we: (1) combined satellite imagery with terrain elevation data to create a basic reconstruction of the physical site; (2) used terrestrial LiDAR data to provide a geo-referenced point cloud model of the magmatic-volcanic system, as well as the LiDAR intensity values for the identification of rock types; and (3) used Structure-from-Motion (SfM) to construct a photorealistic point cloud of the inside volcano. The workbench provides tools for the direct manipulation of the georeferenced data sets, including scaling, rotation, and translation, and a suite of geometric measurement tools, including length, area, and volume. Future developments will be inspired by an ongoing user study that formally evaluates the workbench’s mature components in the context of fieldwork and analyses activities.     

Redefining the possibility of digital Earth and geosciences with spatial cloud computing

Abstract

Global challenges (such as economy and natural hazards) and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade. The next generation visions pose grand challenges for infrastructure, especially computing infrastructure. The gradual establishment of cloud computing as a primary infrastructure provides new capabilities to meet the challenges. This paper reviews research conducted using cloud computing to address geoscience and Digital Earth needs within the context of an integrated Earth system. We also introduce the five papers selected through a rigorous review process as exemplar research in using cloud capabilities to address the challenges. The literature and research demonstrate that spatial cloud computing provides unprecedented new capabilities to enable Digital Earth and geosciences in the twenty-first century in several aspects: (1) virtually unlimited computing power for addressing big data storage, sharing, processing, and knowledge discovering challenges, (2) elastic, flexible, and easy-to-use computing infrastructure to facilitate the building of the next generation geospatial cyberinfrastructure, CyberGIS, CloudGIS, and Digital Earth, (3) seamless integration environment that enables mashing up observation, data, models, problems, and citizens, (4) research opportunities triggered by global challenges that may lead to breakthroughs in relevant fields including infrastructure building, GIScience, computer science, and geosciences, and (5) collaboration supported by cloud computing and across science domains, agencies, countries to collectively address global challenges from policy, management, system engineering, acquisition, and operation aspects.     

Multiple-Component Scattering Model for Polarimetric SAR Image Decomposition

A multiple-component scattering model (MCSM) is proposed to decompose polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images. The MCSM extends a three-component scattering model, which describes single-bounce, double-bounce, volume, helix, and wire scattering as elementary scattering mechanisms in the analysis of PolSAR images. It can be found that double-bounce, helix, and wire scattering are predominant in urban areas. These elementary scattering mechanisms correspond to the asymmetric reflection condition that the copolar and cross-polar correlations are not close to zero. The MCSM is demonstrated with a German Aerospace Center (DLR) Experimental Synthetic Aperture Radar (ESAR) L-band full-polarized image of the Oberpfaffenhofen Test Site Area (DE), Germany, which was obtained on September 30, 2000. The result of this decomposition confirmed that the proposed model is effective for analysis of buildings in urban areas.      

In-depth examination of spatiotemporal figures in open reproducible research

ABSTRACT

Figures such as maps and time series are essential means to visualize spatiotemporal results in scientific papers. Being able to recompute them using the underlying source code and data is thus a core aspect in reproducible research. However, many scientists see the preparation of code and data for publication as an additional burden without immediate benefits. In this work, we investigate advantages and new capabilities of reproducible research papers. Our key contributions are (i) the extension of a geoscientist’s workflow while examining papers including reproducible figures such as maps and (ii) the prototypical implementation of the workflow as a web application. The workflow is based on current practices of geoscientists and encapsulates benefits of reproducible figures. It is informed by ideas and needs identified by geoscientists in a survey, interviews, and a focus group. Based on their statements, we first extend the traditional workflow steps Discovery and Inspection by additional capabilities and propose two new steps: Manipulation of the content of a spatiotemporal figure and Substitution of the underlying code and data. The extended workflow and its implementation might facilitate in-depth examination and reusability of geoscientific results.