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

An Analytics Platform for Integrating and Computing Spatio-Temporal Metrics

In large-scale context-aware applications, a central design concern is capturing, managing and acting upon location and context data. The ability to understand the collected data and define meaningful contextual events, based on one or more incoming (contextual) data streams, both for a single and multiple users, is hereby critical for applications to exhibit location- and context-aware behaviour. In this article, we describe a context-aware, data-intensive metrics platform —focusing primarily on its geospatial support—that allows exactly this: to define and execute metrics, which capture meaningful spatio-temporal and contextual events relevant for the application realm. The platform (1) supports metrics definition and execution; (2) provides facilities for real-time, in-application actions upon metrics execution results; (3) allows post-hoc analysis and visualisation of collected data and results. It hereby offers contextual and geospatial data management and analytics as a service, and allow context-aware application developers to focus on their core application logic. We explain the core platform and its ecosystem of supporting applications and tools, elaborate the most important conceptual features, and discuss implementation realised through a distributed, micro-service based cloud architecture. Finally, we highlight possible application fields, and present a real-world case study in the realm of psychological health

Internet of Things in Geospatial Analytics

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 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 emerged as a holistic proposal to enable an ecosystem of varied, heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak 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 jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing modern 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.Comment: Book chapter at the Manual of Digital Earth Book, ISDE, September 2019, Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild and Alessandro Annoni, (Publisher: Springer, Singapore

Innovation in geoprocessing for a Digital Earth

Online geoprocessing, the provision and the use of spatial analysis functionality on the Web, is a powerful technological approach to fully realise the vision of a Digital Earth. The Digital Earth objectives include the integration of information across diverse domains in order to address environmental and societal challenges as well as the interactive and exploratory provision of information to a wide audience (Craglia et al. 2008). In research and science contexts, Digital Earth may be seen as ‘ world-wide laboratories ’ to enable collaborative research, exploration, reproduction and validation of theoretical and practical research constructs related to phenomena that leave spatio-temporal traces. Behind the scenes, approaches to support efficient and reliable online geoprocessing that alleviate the tension between the access to multiple and disparate spatial data sources and that support the coherent exploration of these data sources for knowledge discovery are more necess- ary than ever. Progress on online geoprocessing approaches is thus absolutely necessary, almost imperative, to turn Digital Earth ’ s vision and objectives into tangible, usable ‘ tools ’ that for instance allow research teams to perform multi-disciplinary research or ease the ad hoc and timely generation of tailored information for citizens and in sum ensure the advancement of our body of knowledge (Bernard et al. 2014). This special issue provides a state-of-the-art overview on recent developments and real-world applications of online geoprocessing in the view of the given objectives. In the following, we briefly present the seven contributions to this special issue. Subsequently, we discuss trends in research in the area of online geoprocessing