Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital 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)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,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

Attitude determination using digital earth pictures

A computer program called PICATT is reported, which stands for picture attitude determination. Described are the particular satellite to which this technique of attitude determination has been applied, the method of solution, and the results that have been attained using the PICATT program

Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,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 datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Shaping digital earth applications through open innovation – setting the scene for a digital earth living lab

Science and policy increasingly request for sustainable development and growth. Similarly, Digital Earth undergoes a paradigm shift to an open platform that actively supports user engagement. While the public becomes able to contribute new content, we recognize a gap in user-driven validation, feedback and requirements capture, and innovative application development. Rather than defining Digital Earth applications top down, we see a need for methods and tools that will help building applications bottom up and driven by community needs. These should include a technology toolbox of geospatial and environmental enablers, which allow to access functional building blocks and content in multiple ways, but – equally important – enable the collaboration within partially unknown stakeholder networks. The validation and testing in real-life scenarios will be a central requirement when approaching the Digital Earth 2020 goals, which were articulated recently. We particularly argue to follow a Living Lab approach for co-creation and awareness rising in relation to environmental and geospatial matters. We explain why and how such a Digital Earth Living Lab could lead to a sustainable approach for developing, deploying, and using Digital Earth applications and suggest a paradigm shift for Virtual Globes becoming forums for research and innovation

Ground terminal expert (GTEX). Part 2: Expert system diagnostics for a 30/20 Gigahertz satellite transponder

A research effort was undertaken to investigate how expert system technology could be applied to a satellite communications system. The focus of the expert system is the satellite earth station. A proof of concept expert system called the Ground Terminal Expert (GTEX) was developed at the University of Akron in collaboration with the NASA Lewis Research Center. With the increasing demand for satellite earth stations, maintenance is becoming a vital issue. Vendors of such systems will be looking for cost effective means of maintaining such systems. The objective of GTEX is to aid in diagnosis of faults occurring with the digital earth station. GTEX was developed on a personal computer using the Automated Reasoning Tool for Information Management (ART-IM) developed by the Inference Corporation. Developed for the Phase 2 digital earth station, GTEX is a part of the Systems Integration Test and Evaluation (SITE) facility located at the NASA Lewis Research Center

Newsletter of the Digital Earth Project Contributions of the Alfred Wegener Institute to Digital Earth

As an important technical pillar of Digital Earth AWI computing centre provides data management and cloud processing services to the project partners. We develop project specific extensions to the AWI data flow framework O2A (Observation to Archive). Sensor registration in O2A will support a flexible handling of sensors and their metadata, e.g. for the Digital Earth showcases, methane and soil moisture measurements are in focus for smart monitoring designs and for the access to data in near real time (NRT). Furthermore, data exploration is supported by a rasterdata manager service that can be easily coupled in user ́s data workflows with other data sources, like NRT sensor data. In the following we give more details on O2A, its components and concept

Grasping the global with digital earth

This study examined the extent to which adopting a more subject-led approach to teaching with the interactive geospatial tool, the Climate HotMap, can enhance geographical knowledge and understanding of climate change. Findings showed the significance of teachers paying more attention to geography’s central concepts of place, space, interconnection and environment in understanding the impact of climate change on local places but also on the relations between places in the bigger global climate change picture