“In a speech prepared for the California Science Center in Los Angeles on January 31, 1998, Gore described a digital future where schoolchildren – indeed all the world’s citizens – could interact with a computer-generated three-dimensional spinning virtual globe and access vast amounts of scientific and cultural information to help them understand the Earth and its human activities.” This is the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry for “Digital Earth”. The idea of a 3-D viewer tool that would allow anybody to digitally interact with the whole Earth with a desktop computer, was an appealing and disruptive challenge at the time. Fast forward 20 years, technology has changed too. It has changed very fast, indeed. Not only can the entire digital world be accessed from an average desktop computer, making Gore’s dream come true, but from our pockets too, anywhere, anytime. Today’s mobile devices, with increasing computing capabilities, relying on ever-faster communication networks, and with more and more available spatio-temporal data, are all major drivers to go well beyond the original idea of Digital Earth and to interrelate with other pervasive information infrastructures of relevance today.

The release of the “Manual of Digital Earth” is an important milestone to remind us all what the research community, government agencies and industry have accomplished over the past 20 years. It is an extensive account of the current situation of Digital Earth from varied and diverse perspectives. The 800-plus open access book is divided in 4 major parts, comprising 26 chapters in total: Digital Earth Technologies, Digital Earth for Multi-domain Applications, Digital Earth Regional & National Development, and Digital Earth Education and Ethics. The book admits a second reading too: it is an accurate report of the new challenges facing Digital Earth today.

GEOTEC researchers have contributed to two chapters in the Digital Earth Technology part. The first contribution is the chapter entitled “Geospatial Information Infrastructures”. As a leading author, EC-JRC project officer Sven Schade (@innovatearth) managed to recruit a cohort of researchers with different background and experience on topics closely related to SDI and Geospatial Information Infrastructures. Carlos Granell and Michael Gould are co-authors of this piece, which adopts a holistic and largely ambitious approach, since it covers the past, present and future of such crucial infrastructures. Given that the concept of SDI dates back the 80s and 90s of the past century, the chapter can be seen as a brief story of SDI, complemented with a subtle view of the present situation and a discussion of the future challenges.

The abstract reads as follows.

Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic, organizational and legal structure that allow for the discovery, sharing, and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data infrastructures (SDI). We outline the history of GIIs in terms of the organizational and technological developments as well as the current state-of-art, and reflect on some of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension between increased needs for standardization and the ever-accelerating technological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challenged to become flexible and robust enough to absorb and embrace technological transformations and the accompanying societal and organizational implications. With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments.

Cite it as:

Schade S. Granell C., Vancauwenberghe G., Kessler C., Vandenbroucke D., Masser I., Gould M. (2020) Geospatial Information Infrastructures. In: Guo H., Goodchild M., Annoni A. (eds) Manual of Digital Earth. Springer, Singapore (pp 161-190). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3_5

The second contribution was directed by GEOTEC researcher Sergi Trilles, who coordinated the efforts to write a 30+ piece about “Internet of Things”. The task of connecting Internet of Thing and Digital Earth was extremely challenging. We did not want to describe again the list of key technologies that enable both infrastructures, published elsewhere (https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/7/7/269) and in other chapters of the book. Therefore, we adopted a different approach that consisted of exploring synergies and frictions to establish an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures. A key idea that shapes the chapter is the need to find viable collaborations between the two infrastructures To some extent, this can be seen as a continuation of the previous one, since the establishment of such bridges and collaboration to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems are present and future challenges for Digital Earth.

The abstract reads as follows.

Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) emerged as a holistic proposal to enable an ecosystem of varied, heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth.

Cite it as:

Granell C., Kamilaris A., Kotsev A., Ostermann F.O., Trilles S. (2020) Internet of Things. In: Guo H., Goodchild M., Annoni A. (eds) Manual of Digital Earth. Springer, Singapore (pp. 387-423). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3_11