Since the beginning of the digital era, open-source communities have significantly contributed to advancing geospatial technologies and their applications. Open-source software, libraries and tools began to gain popularity in the 1980s, but at the time, their use was constrained by their steep learning curve. The open-source package is now regarded as powerful, mature, user-friendly software and the open-source approach has been proven to be the best strategy in the digital sharing economy. While open standards ensure a shared understanding and uphold the interoperability of connected big data platforms, open resources allow a larger community to participate in contributing, analyzing, cultivating, managing, and sharing data.
Open technologies have also been playing an important role in the development and implementation of the Digital Earth concept. After two decades of research and development, there remain many challenges for the future of Digital Earth platforms. On the one hand, infrastructures for data collection, management, analysis, and information extraction are improving as a result of technological innovation. On the other hand, Digital Earth platforms must adjust to the complexity of the big data era, i.e., the 4 Vs (volume, variety, veracity, velocity) and evolving geospatial data need due to the socio-economic progression. This Article Collection focuses on the contribution of open technologies, including data, standards, software and libraries, to the research, development and implementation of Digital Earth.
We welcome research papers, review articles, and short technical letters. Topics of interest to the Article Collection include, but are not limited to:
- Using open resources such as tools, libraries, data, for geospatial scientific research
- Applications, case studies and empirical research related to open technologies
- Novel open technologies and methodologies development such as, machine learning, multimodal data fusion, artificial intelligence and so on
- Quality of open data
- Open data governance
- Visualization challenges in open data
- Open resources for e-government
- Open resources for geospatial education
Guest Advisors Biography：
Prof. Maria Antonia Brovelli: Degree with honours in Physics, PhD in Geodesy and Cartography. She is a Professor of “GIS” and “The Copernicus Green Revolution for sustainable development” at Politecnico di Milano (PoliMI) and a member of the School of Doctoral Studies in Data Science at “Roma La Sapienza” University. From 2006 to 2011 she lectured GIS at the ETH of Zurich and from 1997 to 2011 she was the Head of the Geomatics Laboratory of PoliMI (Campus Como). From 2011 to 2016 she was the Vice-Rector of PoliMI for the Como Campus. Currently, she is the coordinator of the Copernicus Academy Network for the PoliMI and the Head of the GEOLab, the Interdepartmental Lab where 7 Departments of PoliMI are contributing. She is Vice President of the ISPRS Technical Commission on Spatial Information Science, a former member of ESA ACEO (Advisory Committee of Earth Observation), co-chair of the United Nations Open GIS Initiative, chair of the UN-GGIM (Global Geospatial Information Management) Academic Network, mentor of the PoliMI Chapter of YouthMappers (PoliMappers), one of the three curators of the geospatial series of the AI for Good, organized by ITU in partnership with 40 UN Sister Agencies.
Prof. Silvana Philippi Camboim: Prof. Camboim serves as a professor at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) in Brazil, where she conducts research on spatial analysis, interoperability, geospatial semantics, collaborative mapping, and spatial data infrastructure. Her work primarily addresses complex urban, environmental, and health-related challenges, advocating for the utilization of open-source technologies and open data. She holds the position of Chair for the International Cartographic Association Commission on Open Source Geotechnologies, and Co-Chair for the ISPRS Working Group on Openness in Geospatial and Remote Sensing. Additionally, she mentors Mapeadores Livres UFPR (Youth Mappers Chapter) and serves as an OSGeo Board Member. She established the first GeoforAll (ICA-ISPRS-OSGeo) lab in South America, Labgeolivre. Additionally, she is a member of Red Geolibero and GeoforAll Iberoamerica.
Prof. Serena Coetzee: Prof. Coetzee is Head of the Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology at the University of Pretoria (UP). She started her career as a software engineer on the global software development teams of desktop GIS products. Subsequently, as director and project manager at AfriGIS, she led GIS projects ranging from geospatial data collection, manipulation and maintenance to geocoding, spatial analysis and Internet GIS until she joined the University of Pretoria in 2006. Serena’s research focuses on the ever-increasing volumes of geographic information and the challenges of making the information available, accessible and usable. The research is of an interdisciplinary nature, mainly in geoinformatics and computer science. Specific research foci are address data, standards, open principles, geovisualization and geoinformatics education. Her research has revealed the delicate balance between stakeholders across different levels of governments for making national datasets available, accessible and usable.
Prof. Tuong-Thuy Vu: A geospatial scientist by training, Professor Vu has over 20 years of research and teaching experience across Europe and Asia. In 2003-2008, he worked as a research scientist at the Earthquake Disaster Mitigation Research Center, Chiba University, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. After three years of teaching at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, he joined the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in 2011. He became an Associate Professor and was appointed the Head of the Environmental and Geographical Sciences Department. In 2017, he joined Hoa Sen University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, as its Dean of Science and Engineering and Director of Center for Research Development and Support. In August 2018, he was appointed Vice-President of Hoa Sen University. Now, he is a Professor and Dean of Engineering and Science, at Curtin University Malaysia. He was conferred the title of Docent by the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in 2014. His research interest includes open geospatial science and applications to urban environments and disaster management. Professor Vu is an elected charter member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and a senior member of IEEE. He is also a Fellow, a council member of the ASEAN Academy of Engineering and Technology (AAET), and a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.
