serendipityoucity

This is a project worth watching!

‘Digital Earth‘ is a multi-dimensional collaborative science project that aims to advance research into global issues such as climate change.  Digital Earth was launched by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) a program under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Digital Earth is also the first global collaborative research program initiated and led by Chinese scientists.

Digital Earth, a virtual reality planet which collects geological, geographical and space resources into one database, is expected to help economic development, environmental protection, disaster control and prevention, heritage preservation and tracking of terrorism.

I’ve heard about this project for a number of years and it will be really interesting to see how questions of scale and data interoperability are addressed, particularly since both physical and social science data are to be included.  At least in the early discussions, while the two releases I read this morning categorize social science data as - other.  My guess is the project will remain a hard GI science project focusing primarily on physical science data.  I am also very curious to read more about their climate change models, since to date most models have had a number of problems.

The article in Science and Development News states that the Digital Earth project will endeavour to recruit scientists from developing countries particularly in Africa and Latin America. The CAS launch blurb states that there will be:

joint support from a dozen or so countries such as China, Canada, the US, Japan, Czech. Headquartered in Beijing, it aims at promoting academic exchange and cooperation under the concept of Digital Earth, playing a constructive role in sustainable development of the national economy and social progress, environmental protection, mitigation of calamities, protection of the world’s cultural heritage and natural resources, anti-terrorism and maintenance of the political stability worldwide.

I wonder which "national economy" the release is referring to.  I will have to dig more to see who is at the table, which organizations are contributing human resources and who is paying for what.  It will also be interesting to find out more about the policy elements of this project such as: who owns the data and resulting analysis; issues such as data storage; archiving; copyright & IP and so on. Finally, I am really fascinated that China will be leading this endeavour, a country not known for social and environmental sustainability, that has uncontrolled development and the most dangerous mines in the world, and of course a country that exports acid rain and produces huge quantities of particulate matter from its coal burning industries.  It is also a country that has had to deal with numerous cases of fraudulent science, and which has few systematic research policies that address sourcing, referencing and plagiarism.

Perhaps I am a little skeptical! Then again perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised and discover a truly amazing crew of scientists who are committed to these issues and transforming their country’s un-sustainable practices.