On 18 November 2019, Manual of Digital Earth was formally launched by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE).
At the 10th Executive Committee Meeting of ISDE held in Halifax Canada in October 2015, as the third president of ISDE I put forward a proposal to publish a manual that aimed to address questions regarding the relevance of Digital Earth, its future, and its potential to support scientific development and societal needs. The proposal was approved by the Executive Committee, and now, after four years and a culmination of efforts from more than 100 authors from 18 countries worldwide, it is our great pleasure to see the book, Manual of Digital Earth, formally launched.
‘Digital Earth’ is a global initiative to construct a comprehensive virtual representation of our planet. With digital technologies advance, this vision has been quickly becoming a reality since it was raised twenty years ago. Relying on collaborative efforts, Digital Earth theory and technology have been largely promoted and broadly applied in various areas with positive results.
Today it becomes necessary to look through and make an in-depth analysis of the expanding scope of the concept of Digital Earth and the rapid advancements in digital technologies, as well as the impacts of Digital Earth on interdisciplinary science and social progress. We need to think about: What is the basic theory of Digital Earth? What are the key technologies? and What are its main applications? To answer these questions, we need to understand: What are its core characteristics; What is the difference between Digital Earth and geospatial technology? and How does Digital Earth – a frontier interdisciplinary field of Earth science, information science, and space science?
The Manual of Digital Earth is such a timely and appropriate response to these questions. It covers the current status and future directions for Digital Earth research, a systematic analysis of the theories, methods, and technical systems of Digital Earth, and a summary of the key achievements to date, and predicts the likely direction and probable future developments within the discipline. Basically, this book includes the content of (1) theories on Digital Earth, the contents of Digital Earth science, and Digital Earth frameworks and platforms; (2) Digital Earth system technologies, including data acquisition, management, processing, mining, visualization, virtual reality, network computing, spatial data facilities, and information service technologies; (3) applications within the three frameworks of the United Nations, including Sustainable Development Goals, Climate Change, and Disaster Risk Reduction, and other aspects like digital cities, digital heritage, and the digital economies; (4) regional applications of Digital Earth, especially in regions and countries such as Europe, Australia, China, and Russia; and (5) Digital Earth Education and Ethics and the outlook for the future development of Digital Earth, such as the frontier technologies – Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and 5G which may create opportunities for the next stage of Digital Earth. By bridging the information gap amongst space, social networks, and economic data, Digital Earth can generate useful information and scientific knowledge supporting social service functions as well as drive scientific discoveries.
The Manual of Digital Earth is an open access publication available at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-32-9915-3. I strongly believe that governors, researchers, educationists, enterprisers and others in the Digital Earth community will benefit from this book in various ways.