The Manual of Digital Earth, an eBook published by International Society for Digital Earth and co-edited by Prof. Huadong Guo, Prof. Mike Goodchild, and Dr. Alessandro has reached a total of 856000 downloads since its publication in November 2019.
This open access book offers a summary of the development of Digital Earth over the past twenty years. By reviewing the initial vision of Digital Earth, the evolution of that vision, the relevant key technologies, and the role of Digital Earth in helping people respond to global challenges, this publication reveals how and why Digital Earth is becoming vital for acquiring, processing, analyzing and mining the rapidly growing volume of global data sets about the Earth. The book is free available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3#toc
Zhenlong Li is the leading author of the chapter: Geospatial Information Processing Technologies, freely available at https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3_6 (co-authors: Zhenlong Li, Zhipeng Gui ,Barbara Hofer ,Yan Li ,Simon Scheider ,Shashi Shekhar)
Chapter Abstract: The increasing availability of geospatial data offers great opportunities for advancing scientific discovery and practices in society. Effective and efficient processing of geospatial data is essential for a wide range of Digital Earth applications such as climate change, natural hazard prediction and mitigation, and public health. However, the massive volume, heterogeneous, and distributed nature of global geospatial data pose challenges in geospatial information processing and computing. This chapter introduces three technologies for geospatial data processing: high-performance computing, online geoprocessing, and distributed geoprocessing, with each technology addressing one aspect of the challenges. The fundamental concepts, principles, and key techniques of the three technologies are elaborated in detail, followed by examples of applications and research directions in the context of Digital Earth. Lastly, a Digital Earth reference framework called discrete global grid system (DGGS) is discussed.
