Advancing Digital Earth: beyond the next generation

Abstract

The Digital Earth (DE) movement is gaining momentum. Much of it is unstructured. This paper examines a number of recent developments including those in health sensors (Wearable Absence, Q-Sensor, and Guardian Angels) and systems frameworks (Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, Virtual Australia, and New Zealand). Consideration is given to the implications of DE for citizens and on citizen science, including those of ethics. A suite of principles to guide the development of DE is proposed.

Keywords:

• Digital Earth vision
• virtual
• spatial science
• Geomatics
• social science
• ethics

1. Introduction: unisphere and gaiafield: just science fiction?

At his request the secondary thought routines ran a systems check through the macrocellular clusters enriching his nervous system. Exoimages and mental icons unfolded from neutral status to standby in his peripheral vision, lines of shifting iridescence bracketing his natural sight. The exoimages were all default symbols generated by his u-shadow, the personal interface with the unisphere that instantly would connect him to any of its massive data, communication, entertainment, and commerce functions. All standard stuff. (Hamilton 2007, 51)

In Peter Hamilton's ‘Void’ series, which is set in a very distant future, there exist two types of connectivity between people. The first is based on the unisphere, which is essentially an advanced wireless universe encompassing Internet that connects every human being (and alien) with anybody and anything else. In addition, to be linked to the unisphere, a large part of humanity is connected through an emotional transference conductive field called the gaiafield. It is a technologically enabled ‘emotional Internet’ where people with gaiamote transplants in their bodies broadcast and receive emotions. This field enhances life by adding an almost tangible nature to human emotion. It eliminates exerted small talk, amplifies joy (and anger), and makes empathy immediately palpable.

A very distant future? A cursory look at some of the research lab websites suggests that we may have taken the first steps at developing a primitive version of the gaiafield. Barbara Layne of Concordia University and Janis Jeffries of the University of London have developed a clothesline that is called ‘Wearable Absence’ (http://www.wearableabsence.com). It contains biosensors that monitor a number of bodily factors including temperature, heart rate, and breathing. They continually transmit this information to a central database. If the wearer experiences an emotion with a distinct physical signature, for example agitation, calming messages from a loved one can be transmitted from the database to speakers embedded in the clothes. They may also project images or video on a woven-in LED display (Seymour 2011).

There are, of course, systems available that monitor bodily functions and independently contact someone if they change in a dramatic way. These are most commonly used with the elderly or infirmed who live alone. Researchers focus on three main areas of work to develop tools of clinical interest (Bonato 2005): the design and implementation of sensors that are minimally obtrusive and reliably record movement or physiological signals, the development of systems that unobtrusively gather data from multiple wearable sensors and deliver this information to clinicians in the way that is most appropriate for each application, and the design and implementation of algorithms to extract clinically relevant information from data recorded using wearable technology.

This development is taken even further as it takes active steps to determine mood, not only health, based on biometric factors and then actively affect that mood. The company Affectiva has already introduced the Q-Sensor, a wearable, wireless biosensor that measures emotional arousal via skin conductance, a form of electrodermal activity that grows higher during states such as excitement, attention, or anxiety and lower during states such as boredom or relaxation. The sensor also measures temperature and activity (http://www.qsensortech.com/overview/). How much farther is it to a gaiafield scenario if one's clothes can communicate mood directly to the clothes of a loved one (or an interested party)? With some theoretical modifications, the clothes could affect the biometrics of the wearer. Strategically placed heat elements, similar to those found in heated gloves and socks, could be added to match each person's temperature. If we go one step farther and add a future version of the brain interface, one could think about giving a reassuring hug and their clothes could transmit the pressure and warmth. The number of possible value-added information uses based on all of these new data sources is unimaginable.

Other research projects concentrate on marrying nanotechnologies with smart sensors. One of the current proposals for the EU's Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) flagship program is the ‘Guardian Angels for a Smarter Life’ representing a pan-European network under the leadership of Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich to create intelligent and autonomous systems serving individuals in their daily lives (http://www.ga-project.eu/). It will meet the technological challenge of weaving together energy-efficient information processing, sensing, communication, and energy harvesting. Currently, high energy consumption and the short lifespan of batteries are prohibiting the further progress of many technological scenarios. The ‘Guardian Angels’ (GA) are envisioned as intelligent, non-intrusive, and autonomous devices featuring sensing, computation, and communication. ‘Our platform will create the ultimate smart device that will assist us from infancy to old age,’ said Prof Adrian Ionescu, co-project leader, EPFL. ‘One of the key features is its zero power requirement as it will scavenge for energy – think of it as recharging using the environment, sun or movement – a technology that will benefit from bio-inspired concepts’ (http://nanolab.epfl.ch/).

As personal companions, these GA will for instance be used as individual health support tools (physical GA). These digital health assistants may be the key to keeping health and day care affordable and accessible to all in the aging societies of Europe. Furthermore, GA devices will be able to monitor local ambient conditions for environmental danger (environmental GA). Communicating with each other, the devices will enlarge the personal radius of sensory perception. For example, natural disaster warnings will be issued individually and without delay. And gaining access to real-time data on a grand scale will result in saving energy in heating, transportation, and domestic appliances. Ultimately, the device will also perceive emotional conditions and provide helpful functions for the disabled (emotional GA). Thus, for example, quadriplegic patients may be empowered to interact by thought, or the autistic will be enabled to read and send out emotions.

The Virtual Australia and New Zealand (VANZ) initiative illustrates the concept of Digital Earth (DE) on a broader canvass (http://www.vanzi.com.au/). Set up to tackle large systems challenges, VANZ is seeking to exploit the convergence of complementary technologies to create functioning systems models of the built world (Figure 1). Underpinned by topologically structured spatial data, it will utilize simulation, logistics, gaming, and visualization technologies to model real-world situations and optimize solutions in 3D and time stamped 4D. The VANZ concept originated from the challenge posed by the expansion of the Port of Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne is a city of 4.1 million people. It is the biggest container Port in Australia and container movements are set to quadruple by 2035. Street congestion is already at intractable levels with some inner city urban streets hosting up to 20,000 truck movements per day. The expansion will require a radically reworked supply chain, linking sea, road and rail, and the factoring in of additional capacity at two additional small Ports within 100 km of the main hub. VANZ conceives a fully functioning virtual model, with options, drawing on a data model of single point of truth, allowing the hundreds of affected stakeholders to thrash out the risks and options in a collaborative environment prior to a decision on the preferred plan. It is proposing a formal framework that enables authoritative data to be maintained in a secure environment that will underpin transactions in the real world in the same way that hardcopy land titles for example operate today. At base, VANZ will represent both the 3D Physical Attributes of the real world across time, plus Legal Entitlements. These entitlements will be based on the simple principle that ‘Rights in the Authorized Virtual World = Rights in the Real World’. To uniquely identify the ‘Authorized Data Set’ to which this principle applies, it is proposed that a new ‘infrastructure’ of Government and Commercial Data Banks be set up to hold the ‘official version’ of all 3D data-sets for every object in the real world. These data-sets would be under the control of the ‘object’ owner, just as traditional banks hold our money under the control of the account holder. This ‘infrastructure’ will be paid for out of fees charged to all people and organizations engaged in the ‘property-sector’ in consideration of cheaper, quicker, and better services. It is envisaged that the ‘official data-set’ will also underpin third-party uses that can access the data that are publically available, such as for all location services, as well as the context for economic and social data.

Figure 1. Virtual Australia & New Zealand: using the Virtual World to design and manage the Real World.

Similarly, the EU's FET program also looks to the big picture of DE. The ‘FuturICT’ is an initiative coordinated by researchers from the University College London and ETH Zurich (http://www.futurict.eu/). The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator aims at an integrated techno-socioeconomic-environmental systems approach. The ultimate goal of the FuturICT flagship project is to understand and manage complex, global, socially interactive systems, with a focus on sustainability and resilience. Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies probably constitutes one of the most pressing scientific grand challenges of our century and is equally important for the development of novel robust, trustworthy and adaptive information, and communication technologies (ICT), based on socially inspired paradigms. FuturICT platform consists of the following components (FuturICT Consortium 2012): (1) the Planetary Nervous System (PNS) to bring together existing and new data sources; (2) the Living Earth Simulator (LES) to combine the data with models to produce an integrated simulation of the social, economic, technical, and environmental conditions of the world; (3) a Global Participatory Platform to enable citizens, businesspeople, scientists, and policy-makers to interact with the FuturICT components; (4) observatories that will be set up in universities and research institutes across Europe as scientific and technological infrastructures of the PNS and LES; (5) four super observatories, known as Exploratories, to integrate the data and models from the observatories to provide simulations and policy guidance on the Environment, the Economy, the Society and Technology; and (6) an Innovation Accelerator to speed up the development of new scientific knowledge and achieve more rapid routes to dissemination and exploitation (Figure 2).

Figure 2. FuturICT Platform (from FuturICT Consortium 2012).

Although this research initiative does not explicitly address any spatial context, it seems quite clear that this approach combined with the ‘emotional Internet’ developments described above could form the basis of an advanced Digital Earth (ADE) concept that includes the unisphere and gaiafield of Hamilton's science fiction.

It is therefore necessary for scientists and practitioners who are concerned with DE developments to step back and look at the developments of other disciplines for a vision beyond the continuation of current DE approaches.

Digital replicas (or ‘mirror worlds’) of complex entities and systems are now routine in many fields such as aerospace engineering, archeology, medicine, or even fashion design. The DE concept as a digital replica of the entire planet occurs first in Al Gore's (1992) book Earth in the Balance) and was popularized in the written version of his speech notes distributed at the California Science Center in January 1998. It played a pivotal role in stimulating the development of a first generation of virtual globes, typified by Google Earth that achieved many elements of this early vision. Almost 15 years after Al Gore's speech, the concept of DE needs to be re-evaluated in the light of the many scientific and technical developments in the fields of information technology, data infrastructures, citizen's participation, and earth observation that have taken place since.

This paper intends to look beyond the next generation predominantly based on the developments of fields outside the spatial sciences, where concepts, software, and hardware with strong relationships to DE are being developed without referring to this term. We will look not only at the technical components of an advanced DE (Section 2) but also into the importance that an ADE will have on the people living in an interconnected world (Section 3). We will argue that ADE needs a set of strict guiding principles and a code of DE ethics (Sections 4 and 5) to play its envisioned role for the betterment of humankind. The paper ends with an optimistic scenario presentation on foreseeable developments for the early twenty-first century (Section 6). However, to quote Niels Bohr, the Nobel laureate physicist, we are well aware that ‘predictions can be very difficult, especially about the future’.

2. The power of Digital Earth: its core elements

While these technological advances come from disciplines that are inherently non-spatial, we are convinced that they will unleash their full potential only when married with the developments in spatial science, which is by harnessing the power of geographic location. The future DE will, however, not only integrate technological progress but also reflect socioeconomic evolution and environmental considerations. Only then can DE truly serve the needs of humankind and be more than a technological exercise with potentially threatening consequences.

While Gelernter's Mirror World concept (Gelernter 1991) was still based on computers sharing data and enabling access to a modeled mirror world, the developments that we are envisioning for the DE 2020 (see also Craglia et al. 2012) encompasses a ubiquitous pervasive wireless infrastructure that consists of billions of sentient nodes enabling both Hamilton's ‘unisphere and gaiafield’ scenarios. Nanotechnology development will result in tiny sentient entities that can be placed on or in a human being to monitor, broadcast, and receive information into and from the future DE network. The same DE network with its pervasive nodes is the medium to conduct scientific research, provide access to knowledge and information, and to act as real-time communication system, eventually leading to a DE nervous system and related information processing spinal cord and brain (De Longueville et al. 2010). For an optimistic future DE scenario, it should not only be sentient and evolving but also self-sustained with no or very little energy consumption.

All objects in our daily lives will be uniquely identified, inventoried, and connected. Central to the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ (Kranenburg 2008) and the ‘Web of Things’ (Guinard and Trifa 2009) is the ability to discern the identity, status, and location of these objects. With these details known and accounted for, things can become active participants in our lives and business processes and can even act autonomously on our behalf. Woven into DE is the concept of the sensor web, where sensors on objects that are active in our environments take stock of their surroundings and communicate conditions.

The complexity of such an interactive and interconnected system that merges the inanimate with the living will require the means to organize and simplify interactions. One of the easiest approaches to this simplification is the concept of real space, that is, the geographic location, size, and dimension of things. Location in time and space will be an increasingly important factor for tracking and controlling the interactions, particularly when things become sentient and begin acting autonomously on our behalf. People immersed in DE expect the ease-of-use that they know from computer games and geobrowsers. This means that the DE development will bring together the worlds of database designers, modelers, simulators, gamers, robotic experts, visualizers, logistics specialists, and web app programmers amongst others. DE will not be based on a ready-to-make grand concept but will rather evolve as a series of often small and sometimes disruptive changes. In full bloom, DE will manage to bridge the gap between its developers and stakeholders, particularly the private citizen and thereby stimulate further innovation and co-creation processes. Future DE applications will benefit from this opening up and exchange of ideas, software components, and applications.

As DE is inclusive in nature, we have to ensure that the needs of the current ‘have nots’ will be adequately addressed. Craglia et al. (2012) suggest a country-based DE index that represents the state of digital development of each country. This index is based on the relationship of the rate of energy consumption by population (which is taken as a proxy for dependency on digital goods and equipment) and the rate of Internet penetration reflecting a need for advanced technology use. We propose that a more robust index be developed that is not tied to energy consumption as an indicator for economic development. Indeed we challenge an authoritative body to develop a robust and reliable DE index based on measurable criteria. This DE index could be used to regularly assess the DE development of all countries to ensure that DE is not only for the wealthy parts of the world. The DE index per country and its changes should then be published for all to see.

The ‘after next’ DE will be breathtakingly ‘virtual’ and perhaps dangerously predictive through simulations (4D both forward and back in time) that are increasingly realistic in their visualizations, blurring reality. Increasingly, these simulations will go beyond the simple illustrations but will be ‘metric’, providing measurement and data, not just video pictures. It will appeal to and include more senses such as sight, sound, movement, and even smell. It will integrate data from all sources; ‘everything is somewhere’, in the ‘exa-flood.’ At the same time, DE will be used by real people (and things) in real-life situations and thereby provide a solid grounding to its virtual counterparts. With this, it will provide access to information as it has never been possible and thereby will empower citizens in ways not seen before, facilitating education, innovation, and interaction. DE will ultimately blur the boundary of government versus private ownership of information and challenge governments' supremacy for ‘authoritative’ information. DE will obligate the society to prepare new modes of governance, regulation, authenticity, accuracy, and ethical guidance. It has the potential to completely change our society from a production-based economy to that of an education- and information-based economy. It will underpin the semantic world, with its cyber intelligence and increasingly automated and robotic capabilities.

3. Citizen Science, citizen participation, citizen manipulation

Al Gore saw the citizen as the ultimate beneficiary of DE's ambitious goals even though, ironically, the citizen was not an active participating contributor (see also Goodchild 2012). Furthermore, the means of interaction originally foreseen was mainly limited to navigation and the use of the visualization capacities. The diffusion of the Internet and the popularization of interactive technologies (smart phones, tablets, etc.) have created new opportunities for citizens, and their role has significantly changed in recent years (Goodchild et al. 2012). For example, social networks and communities of practice are creating alternative source of data and information. They are freely accessible and in some cases offer real alternatives to the authoritative data provided by the Public Sector authorities and competitors to Private Data providers (e.g. OpenStreetmap vs TeleAtlas or Navteq).

However, these new opportunities raise issues not yet investigated nor fully understood that can be the cause of ethical concerns. Citizen science is sometimes called ‘public participation in scientific research’ (Hand 2010). It includes the collection and analysis of data, development of technologies (e.g. new apps for smartphones), and the dissemination of results by individuals (including non-professional researchers). In this specific sense, citizens can be considered a special type of ‘sensor.’ Goodchild (2007) argues that there is a long tradition of non-specialists contributing to the collection of scientific information but that only recently the convergence of greater access to broadband connections, the availability of Global Positioning Systems at affordable prices, and more participative forms of interaction on the Web (Web 2.0) have enabled vast numbers of individuals to create and share geographic information. As observed by Goodchild, the potential for up to seven billion human sensors to monitor the state of the environment, validate global models with local knowledge, and provide information that only humans can capture is vast and has yet to be fully exploited. It is inconceivable that the construction of an earth observing system in future will occur without the contribution of the billons of people who inhabit it.

In a broader perspective, citizen participation should also consider the need to better connect scientists to citizens. DE offers a real opportunity to better address societal challenges. In this way, citizens may be more likely to improve their understanding of the forces that shape society such as measures to ensure global environmental sustainability of our planet. Scientists will be ever more strongly compelled to spend less time in ivory towers and more time in communication, dissemination, and the explanation of scientific knowledge. The technology today provides the means to address this gap but research is still needed to better understand communication sociology and visualization effectiveness and tools (e.g. how to visualize abstract concepts in space). The two examples below may help to clarify the potential risks in underestimating the negative impact of incorrect visualization choices.

Consider a map and its polygons, that is, representations of 2D geometries, related to flood risk. It is made public, without explanation, for the first time. The value of properties inside the high-risk areas is likely to decrease, insurance companies will increase their costs or refuse to insure, and other unexpected sociological impacts could happen (e.g. citizen stress, anxiety, maybe even anger). This scenario poses important questions. Is a polygon the right way to visualize the risk area and to communicate the risk to the public? Does the map come with an explanation of the uncertainty associated with the accuracy of the polygons? In many instances the uncertainty of the model or the accuracy of data used (e.g. the accuracy of the digital elevation model) could be crucial to determining the degree of risk. In addition, the model may not adequately consider proposals to build new infrastructure to protect the properties (which in some cases may reduce the risk to zero).

The second example involves the impact of the 2012 tsunami in Japan. Several satellite images and aerial photos (before and after the disaster) were extensively shown in various media. The strongest emotional reactions though occurred when the impact was demonstrated by showing a video street view of a road in the city before and after the tsunami. By watching the real-life situation unfold before, during, and after the catastrophe and the total absence of life after the tsunami, citizens grasp the implications in a much more effective way than by looking at disconnected remotely sensed data (note that the reverse may be true for professionally trained specialist users and decision makers). The message here is that DE communication should be dynamically adapted to different audiences.

A more sensitive aspect that needs to be addressed is citizen manipulation. DE has the potential to both increase and reduce the capacity to manipulate opinions, decisions, and actions of citizens. All Internet users already face problems related to reliability of information and its distorted use. This problem relates to openness and transparency, and there are attempts to reduce its freedom of use, some legitimate such as those that are protecting privacy and some with more nefarious motives. These influences are part of the community dynamics that have to be studied in order to detect behavioral change due to the presence of DE.

There are a number of issues that need further consideration. DE citizens deserve to understand the distinction between ‘official’ authoritative and other data. What about different ‘predictive’ models providing conflicting outcomes (e.g. on climate change impacts)? How to ensure the quality and timelessly of DE data and modeled virtual worlds? Are we sure that personal data collected by information providers (including telecoms) will be safely anonymized and then destroyed? How do citizens manage their personal rights when they subscribe to hundreds of licenses for different types of information services? What ‘motivates’ people to waive privacy issues and how to cope with arising transparency (e.g. http://www.patientslikeme.com/)?

Orthogonal to the above, the technology perspective also presents a series of new challenges. The following examples well illustrate technical issues to be addressed by future generations of DE. In our first example we look at relational databases. Until a few years ago, large amounts of data were treated via relational databases using the so called Structured Query Language (SQL). This standard approach needed highly optimized systems in order to provide satisfactory support to storage and access to growing volumes of data. However, the restrictions on some systems are now so tight that even small changes can be difficult to make. Questions are now raised as to whether SQL will be able to cope with the ‘data deluge’ experienced by web companies and in the transition to eScience, particularly addressing the required cyber infrastructures (Bottum et al. 2008). A new approach to data is becoming sufficiently mature for deployment; it promises to be faster and more scalable. It is called ‘Not only SQL’ (NoSQL) and is a broad umbrella for several solutions. The objective of NoSQL is to provide different ways to cope with heterogeneous and unstructured data, fast changing models and applications, fault tolerance and the increasing demand of large amount of data analysis. There are implications for the society; the NoSQL approach is especially suited for the handling of partitioned large data-sets in distributed storage, with NoSQL databases already being used by leading enterprises for cloud services. We can expect the market share of NoSQL databases to grow. However, this distributed type of storage creates new challenges to ensure protection of the data and privacy of its owners.

The second example refers to a project under development in Japan aiming to create a Personal Account System for Citizens to declare their personal attitude through eServices. Instead of declaring personal choices when subscribing to a new eService, each citizen manages their personal account through declared preferences (e.g. you can use my location, don't send me notifications, keep me informed about news in this domain, etc.). Providers of eServices will access the personal account of their subscribers and will deliver services that conform to their settings. This practical approach could certainly help to formalize relationships while respecting the preferences of the subscribers. Users who are not particularly concerned with privacy issues will receive better tailored services (e.g. considering location), whereas services for the other users will be less accurate but offers more privacy.

These two examples and the considerations above show that citizen engagement is essential to improve our capacity to observe and protect our environment. But it raises fundamental issues about the structure, access, ethics, and rights of use that need to be addressed in order to assist the citizens of DE. Guiding principles are required.

4. Guiding principles

We contend that the first principle of DE is unrestricted accessibility to DE by all of humankind whether they are individuals, government agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and for-profits and not-for-profits organizations. Defined social mores governing the accepted exchange of information will be challenged by this approach because the move to unrestricted access does not sit comfortably with all nationalities, spiritualities, and jurisdictional and other defining belief systems. Security, privacy, and commercial confidentiality must also be respected. This principle then is aspirational because it is never likely to completely attain in reality due to the demands for a reasonable and acceptable degree of privacy and confidentiality.

The second principle is that DE should be developed for the purpose of progressing the needs of society and humankind as a whole. It should be capable of supporting the four obligations of a good government first articulated by Edmund Burke in 1795: public peace, public safety, public order, and public prosperity (Burke 1800). The Brundtland report's definition of sustainable development reflects a similar but more contemporary sentiment: that of humankind's obligation to respect the integrity of all of earth's interrelated human and non-human systems and processes: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, 41).

The third principle of DE is that it will always be ‘on’, immediate, with known precision, comprehensive, and fully interactive. It will offer access to information from ‘blue sky to bedrock’ in immersive 3D at everybody's finger-tips anywhere, anytime. To the individual it will be sentient, offering advice, warnings, and guidance, by being aware of the individual and relating place to circumstances (Table 1). It will, for example, increasingly be drawing on each individual's health records to do this, just like Google or Amazon is drawing on our search preferences now.

Table 1. Summary of the guiding principles for DE.

Principle	Core elements
1. Unrestricted access: there will be unrestricted access to DE by all humankind.	Applies to all individuals, government agencies, NGO's, not-for-profit organizations and for-profit organizations.
2. For the whole of humankind: DE will be developed for the purpose of progressing the needs of humankind as a whole.	Judged by its positive contribution to public peace, public safety, public order, and public prosperity consistent with the Brundtland definition of sustainable development.
3. Always ‘on’: DE will always be ‘on’, immediate, with known precision and accuracy, comprehensive, fully interactive, and available anywhere at any time.	DE will be ubiquitous. It will be of known spatial and temporal accuracy and will be sentient.

5. Code of ethics

There are a number of issues, however, that need to be addressed to avoid negative developments that are already visible in our current Internet such as cybercrime, unwanted profiling, spam, security breach, and non-approved monitoring. DE advocates are almost evangelical in support of a connected world and promote a ‘sink or swim’ policy with a future where technology will ultimately handle things better than the human mind. For example, David Gelernter speaks of a post-web technology (lifestream), which will be a part of everybody's life (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gelernter10/gelernter10_index.html): You might be able to adapt the pace of the lifestream to your needs but you have to stay connected.

There are others, however, who are more skeptical of the ‘brave new world’ of the future fearing that commercial and political interest as well as the human wish for connectedness may generate a streamlined new culture where ultimately man and machine algorithms will merge in a complete digital world: the profile becomes me (Meckel 2011). We cannot rule out that we are in the position of being the sorcerer's apprentice but without the sorcerer that can come to our rescue. It is increasingly difficult, if currently not impossible, to separate the ‘trusted inside from the untrusted outside’ (Oppliger 2011). What is therefore needed is that the technological advancements have to be accompanied by the development of a DE code of ethics that ensures privacy, security, and confidentiality in a world where everybody can be connected to everybody else and everything all the time. Without solving this critical dilemma and allowing people to decide whether or not they want to be connected and how much of their thoughts and emotions they want to share, the dream of a wonderful virtual future may well turn into DE nightmare.

Similar to the evolution of bioethics and geoethics, we foresee the necessity to propose a set of underlying principles for the development, implementation, and use of DE, the DEethics, so that DE can deliver the anticipated benefit for all humankind. DEethics should follow generally established ethical principles such as Kant's Categorical Imperative ethics (Kant 1788) that could be summarized as

• Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law.

• Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.

• Act as though you were, through your maxims, a law-making member of a kingdom of ends.

Consideration should be given the DEethics code being developed by a ‘steward’ or a ‘group of stewards’, ratified by a reputable body.

6. Digital Earth as a social science

DE is as much a social science as it is a phenomenon of quantitative science and engineering. It should be equally grounded as a social science with an ontology and epistemology of Digital Earth 2020 [i.e. the study of the nature of the ‘reality’ of DE (ontology), and the study of the process of the acquisition of knowledge (epistemology)]. The ontological implications of DE 2020 and beyond are both fascinating and daunting. This is the virtual world writ large with powerful visual semantics and a capacity for multidimensional cognitive processes that will operate in their own right, increasingly independent from the human operator. Life-like processes will be played out with far more power and influence than a mere video representation. Increasingly distant from our ‘normal’ conception of everyday reality, the virtual world of DE 2020 and beyond will unlock our capacity to utilize the exa-flood and harness the data, information, and knowledge continuum.

7. Foreseeable Developments over the course of this century

Can there be something of a DE 2100 vision? How much will have the environmental and societal changes affected our life on Earth? Will a DE (or the term ‘DE’) still be around in 2100? It is safe to say that the authors of this paper will not be around to see the year 2100. Building on the 2020 vision (Craglia et al. 2012; Goodchild et al. 2012), however, we speculate that we will witness the emergence of a sentient DE, which will be an unconscious presence in our life. The rate of observed progress in the development of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, wireless communication, data storage, knowledge dissemination, and other yet to be conceived technologies lends weight to this speculation. In the end, we can only make predictions based on past and present experiences; practice will reveal all. Community dynamics, that is, individuals and society at large, will continuously shape DE and its applications in unexpected ways, both, negative and positive.

DE will be time stamped and topological. It will play out scenarios as genuine simulations of the world that maybe or was, at any speed, and discover consequences that can be quantified, verified, and risk managed in ways not possible today. The increasing danger of ‘believing’ one scenario will be tempered by our need to validate the outcomes with competing scenarios, and new protocols will be necessary to protect the users from themselves.

As humans we are not consciously aware of the individual neurons that make up our brain. A new intelligence is emerging from the increasing complexity, DE. Could it be that the artificial nodes and connectivity of DE might bring forth a totally new form of intelligence? A DE that is built on ethical principles, we believe, should yield great benefits to all members of society. It will, however, be a changed society that will live in a DE-subsisted world; a society that cannot be separated from its digital counterpart and vice versa.

We know that forecasting scenarios and visions of future developments are always risky and often times plainly wrong. There is no master plan for DE. Progress often appears in areas where hardly anybody would have expected it. This applies especially to our vision of what will happen in the future both near and far. To end with a quote of science fiction writer Peter F. Hamilton: ‘Hands up, I got caught out. It shows that near-term future is a lot harder than far-future (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/24/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror).’ So are we all ready for this future?