6. Digital
Earth Summit
‘Digital Earth in the Era
of Big Data’
Beijing, July 7-8, 2016
Last year in Halifax, Presidents
of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association and the International
Society for Digital Earth signed a Memorandum of Understanding in order to
cooperate and to exchange knowledge and experiences between their communities. GSDI
President Prof. David Coleman was invited to the Scientific Board of the 6.
Digital Earth Summit held in Beijing on 7-8 July, 2016.
Co-chaired by Academician GUO
Huadong, CAS RADI, Beijing and Dr. Alessandro Annoni, Head of the JRC IES DERD
Unit of the European Commission, Ispra,
the event attracted about 300 participants from 30
countries. Actually it provided
also opportunity to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Foundation
of International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE).
The
venue of the event was the Beijing International Convention Centre, where once
also the ISPRS Congress was held in 2008.
Welcome
speeches
The Summit was opened by
GUO Huadong, President of ISDE. Welcome addresses were delivered by LU
Yongxiang, the Founding President of ISDE, President of the Chinese Academy of
Science (CAS), SHANG Yong, Executive Deputy of the Chinese Association for
Science and Technology, Geoffrey Boulton, President of ICSU’s Committee on Data
for Science and Technology (CODATA), Rajib Shaw, Executive Director of the
Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), Prof. Abbas Rajabifard, Former
President of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI, the text
can be downloaded from the GSDI website) and XIANGLI Bin, Deputy President of
CAS.
Keynotes
The invited keynote presentations
of the Digital Earth Summit were delivered by
GUA Huadong, President of
ISDE: Digital Earth in the Context of the
Big Data
Geoffrey Boulton President
of ICSU’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA): Digital Earth and the Open Data
Günter Schreier, Head of
the German Remote Sensing Data Centre at DLR, Oberpfaffenhofen: Collaborative Ground Segments
Alessandro Annoni, Head of
the JRC IES Digital Earth and Reference Data Unit at the JRC Institute of
Environment and Sustainability: Digital
Earth and New data Source: What is changing?
Prof. LI Deren academician,
CAS: Towards Geomatics in Big Data Era
Prof. Tim Foresman,
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane: Beyond Moore’s Law:
Trevor Taylor of the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC): Enabling the Digital Earth: The Role of Open Standards
Parallel
sessions
Almost 200 abstracts were received from 20 countries
for the thematic parallel sessions arranged in 5-6 tracks. About 90
presentations were delivered in 13 sessions covering the following topics:
Volunteer Geographic
Information
Digital Earth Applications
in the Context of Big Data I - II
The role of open standards
in the era of Big Data
Digital Mountain: Big Data
and Mountain Surface Process
HIST & SDIM Special
Session on Space Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage
Crop Monitoring and
Precision Agriculture
Technology advances in
Digital Earth I – III
Technological Systems of
Digital Earth
Microwave Earth Observing
LIDAR Remote Sensing in the
Era of Big Data
Digital Earth in Industry
CODATA Special Session on
Open Data in a Big Data World
Hyperspectral Remote
Sensing in the Era of Big Data
Discovery, Perceiving and
Conservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage Based Big Data
Global Environmental Change
Remote Sensing
SAR Information Integrated
Processing and Environmental Parameter Inversion
Award ceremonies and
Welcome Reception
Digital Earth
Science/Technology Contribution Award
Recipients: Dr. Alessandro
Annoni, Prof. LI Deren
ISDE Special
Contribution Award
Recipient: Prof. WANG
Quinmin
ISDE Service Award
Recipients: Prof. WANG Changlin,
Prof.Milan Konecny, Dr.Mario Hernandez, Dr.Fred Campbell (posthumus)
ISDE Conference
Organising Award
Recipients: Gua Huadong
akadémikus (Peking), Prof.Temenoujka Bandrova (Nessebar), Dr.Peter Woodgate
(Perth), Dr. Richard Simpson (Wellington), Prof. Mazlan bin Hashim (Kuching),
Prof. Hiromichi Fukui (Nagoya), Prof. Hugh Millward (Halifax)
ISDE Life Member
Outstanding Paper Awards were conveyed to Prof. Michael F. Goodchild, Prof.
Yang Chaowei, Dr. Max Craglia (JRC) and Joseph O. Sexton, whom papers published
in the International Journal of Digital Earth were most frequently cited or
downloaded. (About the award ceremonies
a separate, illustrated report has been prepared for GSDI)
Exhibitions
and posters
The major exhibitors represented mainly the Chinese EO
Industry and Research Institutions including the Institute of Remote Sensing
and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Science (CAS RADI), the Centre of
Excellence on Space Technology for Disaster Mitigation (CAS TWAS), which
performs capacity building and international scientific programs,
SuperMap spatial data products and service provider (Hong Kong, Beijing,
Tokyo), looking for cooperation partners worldwide in product distribution and
solution provision, (if interested, visit www.supermap.com or contact globalsupport@supermap.com ). Among the exhibitors was the International Centre on Space
Technologies for Natural and Cultural Heritage an institution hosted by RADI under
the auspices of UNESCO (www.unesco-hist.org). According to LIU Zhen,
Secretary-general of the Organising Committee of the 6th Digital
Earth Summit, alltogether 6 co-organisers, 5 institutions and universities and
5 private sector representative took part in the exhibition. Over 100 posters
were accepted but the number of displayed ones were around 50.
Forthcoming
ISDE events
Organised for every odd year, the next ISDE Symposium
will be held in Sydney between April 3-6, 2017, in conjuction with the Locate
17 Conference. The ISDE Council Meeting
held on 6th July 2016 in Beijing accepted the bid of the Italian CNR
to host the 2019 Symposium in Florence, Italy. It was the first successful
attempt to bring the Symposium back to Europe after 2003!
Announcement: The Digital Belt and Road (DBAR) initiative
The research program
envisaged for the next ten years was initiated by the CAS RADI (Institute of
Remote Sensing and Digital Earth of the Chinese Academy of Science) and has
cooperating members from 20 countries along the maritime and land Silk Roads (if
interested please contact: DBAR@radi.ac.cn ). The scientific cooperation has
the aim to demonstrate the use and application of Big Earth Data for the
benefit of people and economy providing sustainable development on local,
national and regional level. The affected area covers three continents from
China to the Netherlands including Kuala Lumpur, Nairobi and Moscow.
 |
| Courtesy of ISDE |
Editorial Board Meeting of the International Journal
for Digital Earth
Chaired by the
Editor-in-Chief GUO Huadong and Editor Prof WANG Changlin, the participants
were informed on the promising facts of the internationally acknowledged
journal between the top Remote Sensing periodica. Representative of the
Publisher Taylor & Francis gave in-sight look on the scientific content,
citations, contributing institutions and countries and download statistics.
Member of the Board were asked to provide suggestions and recommendations. The
last issue (Vol. 9 No. 1-3) had 324 pages containing state of the art articles
on the Digital Earth and the ICSU’s Future Earth by GUO Huadong, Prof. Peter
Baumann et al: Big Data Analytics for Earth Sciences: the Earth Server Approach,
as well as Adam Lewis et al: Rapid, High-resolution Detection of Environmental
Change over Continental Scales from Satellite Data - the Earth Observation Data
Cube.
Further
publications displayed
Booklet
entitled “To Benefit Society by Promoting the Development and Realisation of
Digital Earth”. Edited
by the ISDE Secretariat, this 36-page publication gives an overview of the
history of the International Symposia and Summits on Digital Earth and it was
published at the 10th Anniversary of the Foundation of the International
Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) www.digitalearth-isde.org .
China Scientific Data (a brand new journal, ISSN 2096-2223)
Published by the Computer
Network Information Centre of the Chinese Academy of Science (www.csdata.org) and the National Committee of the CAS CODATA, the first issue of the
Quarterly was published in June 2016. Editor-in-Chief is GUO Huadong of the Key
Laboratory of the Digital Earth Science at the CAS Institute of Remote Sensing
and Digital Earth. The leading article of the first issue deals with the
investigation of the snow-land cover of the Tibetan Plateau in the period of
July 2002 and April 2016 using MODIS imageries. Snow is one of the most active
natural element on the Earth surface having significant impact on the regional
and global climate change, the energy balance and the water cycle. A area of
assessment covers the full territory of the Tibetan Autonom Region and the
database contains 69 GB of data (http://www.sciencedb.cn/dataSet/handle/55).
The 2016 Innovation Summit on Smart City and Smart
Life
One floor below the Summit
and its Exhibition, the Beijing International Convention Centre hosted an independent but contextually connected event
with the title above. Presenters were mostly American and Chinese experts and
the average life of the participants seemed to be below 25. Some of the
exhibitors came from the Artificial Intelligence Security sector (www.aisec.com ).
The event was arranged by
the Beijing Science and Technology Association, the Chinese-US Innovation
Network (http://innovationchain.org ), the Beijing Overseas Talent Centre (BOTC), as well
as the Beijing Academy of Agricultural and Forestry (BAAFS), in cooperation
with the Chinese Artificial Intelligence Association (CAAI). The urban and
rural intelligent transportation systems were under the spotlight. Visual impressions
of the event: https://picasaweb.google.com/112066959995287816437/6306947141727866801?authuser=0&feat=directlink
New
Book: Remote Sensing Image Fusion - A Practical Guide
A textbook written by Christine
Pohl (University of Osnabrück) and John van Genderen (University of Twente)
All photos were taken by G. Remetey if not otherwise specified
