New Zealand Summit

What do you get when the Prime Minister, the Mayor of Auckland, scores of other mayors, and council members open your Digital Earth Summit? You get the political will do what is necessary to build your digital infrastructure and focus your nation’s attention onto the path for sustainability. The Summit (www.digitalearth.org.nz) was an amazing event generating enormous enthusiasm and interest into the questions behind linking advanced DE technologies to the challenges facing communities, cities, and nations in the waves of global change. Prime Minister Helen Clark provided a brilliant open speech unwavering in recognition of the global change realities and the need to harness an informed and connected citizenry to match the challenges ahead. Auckland’s Mayor Richard Hubbard who help host the event was forthright in recognizing the sober perceptions of what government can do and how it must partner with industry, academia, and citizen’s groups to lower our ecological footprints and to stimulate bold new enterprises under the Digital Earth umbrella for our future coping strategies. New Zealand and Auckland have contributed a significant boost to our understanding of the practical aspects of bringing Digital Earth down to Earth for sustainability issues.

World’s Largest Supercomputer Offered to Digital Earth

A captivating view of the world’s largest supercomputer, the Earth Simulator, located just outside of Tokyo, Japan, was presented to an international gathering of the Digital Earth Summit on Sustainability. Dr. Tetsuya Sato, director of the Earth Simulator, demonstrated the various climate and weather modelling capacities of the world’s largest computer and its ability to provide visualized perspectives of complex Earth system processes (http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/). As if this wasn’t enough for the Auckland gathering, Dr. Sato made the offer to host whatever computation needs Digital Earth may have on the Japanese cybernetic leviathan. To this effort, Dr. Sato has agreed to co-lead with the US supercomputer network to provide the cyber backbone for the Digital Earth enterprise’s efforts. The unveiling of this incredibly generous offer will begin with focused communication for Digital Auckland and Digital New Zealand leading to a new understanding of our framework resources at the San Francisco gathering.

Youth Rock Kiwi Summit

Without a doubt, the greatest contribution to the success of the Digital Earth Summit in Auckland was the input and participation of one hundred members of the younger generation, whose sobriquet the Now Generation, changed the dynamics of an already connected audience. Ranging from 17 to 25 years old, these thoughtful and enthusiastic participants began by peppering the older generation with pragmatic questions ranging from where the planetary systems were heading to why New Zealand would decommission railroads to be overrun with carbon spewing automobiles. The Digital Earth community has been blessed with this infusion of talent and intellect that is betting their planet on collective ways to sustain life and protect the ecological goods and services. And they plan to accomplish this with a flair for also incorporating more humane aspect of civilization; jobs, community-cohesion, art, music, and dance. This group will have a profound impact on the maturation and implementation of ISDE5. Clever readers will begin checking out their nascent dialog on this topic (www.thelongsong.com).

Peace Mapping Joins Digital Earth

While War Mapping has been a favorite of the current administration, a group of entrepreneur spirited individuals have been investigating the promise of Peace Mapping. After all, if you can map peace how can we ever expect to find it? The Club of Rome had joined with Astrid Stuckelberger, of the Society for Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI) ( astrid.stuckelberger@sgg-ssg.ch) and Elly Pradervand, Women's World Summit Foundation (WWSF) (wwsf@wwsf.ch) to promote an enhanced understanding and appreciation of the prowess and potential for peace mapping initiatives (http://www.dcaf.ch/wdp/). Ambassador John McDonald, Institute for Multi-Track Diplomancy (www.imtd.org) is co-leading the Peace Mapping committee to bring lifetime of experience in conflict resolution to this high-priority arena. If Digital Earth can not contribute significantly to the challenge of defining the constiuent parts for social decline and dysenfrachisment as well as pathways for peaceful transitions to sustainable communities, then why bother. Peace Mapping presentations may prove to be one of the most important contributions to the San Francisco gathering.

Indigenous People and Communities

A convergence of talent and expertise has entered the Digital Earth world with David Wortley (De Montfort University dwortley@dmu.ac.uk) helping to lead the committee for connecting villages and communities. Wortley will be supported in this effort by leading representatives of Native Americans (James Rattling Leaf), Samis and indigenous artic peoples, as well as communities from Central America and western China. A seismic shift in the use of Digital Earth technologies is rapidly being expressed throughout the globe often outside the coverage of slick tabloids and corporate media outlets. This exciting group of folks will be faced with the Solomon-esque challenge of selecting which groups can be highlighted for the world stage at next June’s event. One thing is for certain, the word will be a bit smaller, and richer, as a result of Wortley and the team’s efforts.

ESRI User Conference - San Diego, California

"Communicating our World" was the message Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, presented to the opening plenary. "Our world needs better understanding, and GIS is the medium that helps us communicate and understand our world."

One impressive innovation ESRI techs demoed was the GDP History Viewer working with the animation and video capabilities of ArcGIS 9.2. A real world application showed historical changes in statistics of children afflicted by asthma. Another dataset showed historical data about air quality in the areas where these children reside, and yet another dataset showed addresses of afflicted children in proximity to freeways. Bringing the datasets together in GIS to produce an animated historical map that showed changes in asthma cases, air quality, and freeway exhaust made health correlations obvious.

(Copy from ESRI UC website)

UC Santa Barbara and the "All-O-Sphere"

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, a new dimension is added to our 3-D world in the very near future. On August 3rd, Professor Keith Clarke of the Geography Department at UCSB gave me a sneak preview of the 3-story spherical high-tech facility, the Allosphere, which incorporates state-of-the-art nanotechnology surface materials and sound (500 individual speakers and sub-woofers) to create a multimedia immersive laboratory for interactive computing and scientific data exploration (allosphere-info@mat.ucsb.edu).

An ambitious research agenda includes use new modes for “gaining insight and developing bodily intuition about environments into which the body cannot venture,” using geo-spatial sciences, as well as of “immersion-based entertainment, fusing future art, architecture, music, media, games, and cinema,” as an excellent example of the 3-D digital earth world defined in Gore’s now famous speech.



This technology will augment Santa Barbara’s already stellar work in digital earth knowledge nets and libraries under Mike Goodchild’s mentoring.

Check out the allosphere here: LINK

Virtual Globes in Boulder Joins Digital Earth

A collection of spinning globe enthusiasts gathered in Boulder in early July to share science experiences and knowledge. Led by Matt Nolan www.earthslot.org from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, a group of over 50 scientists exchanged results from their use of 3-D tessellation engines (ArcGeoExplorer, GeoFusion, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, and World Wind) for a range of projects from melting glaciers to bird influenza in Hong Kong.



These brilliant displays of the earliest explorations into the real-world science applications of spinning globes is a harbinger for the incredible array of displays planned for San Francisco. Indeed, the 2nd Annual Virtual Globes Workshop will be held in conjunction with next year’s Digital Earth Symposium.

UC Berkeley Venue

The science and technology (Part 1) of the conference will be well served by the hosting in Wheeler Hall of the University of California at Berkeley. This full service venue was arranged through collaboration with the International Areas and Studies program and with the Office of the Chancellor for Science and Technology in early August.

Chinese researchers held the China-U.S. Climate Change Forum this past May to forge closer ties between U.C. Berkeley and China by bringing together key experts on important international and bilateral issues. With China’s leadership behind the ISDE5, the selection of Berkeley makes good sense and will continue with multi-lateral international dialogs of significance.

Imaging Notes to Lead ISDE5 Media

When the media is on your side the winds blow more kindly. Publisher Myrna Yoo of Imaging Notes (www.imagingnotes.com) and Blueline Publishing has partnered with the ISDE5 Secretariat to offer vendors and authors an unprecedented package for the San Francisco event and beyond. Beginning with the winter edition, a new section will be created for Digital Earth and continued with each edition. In addition, the summer issue of Imaging Notes will be dedicated to the ISDE5 meeting. Leading vendors will be able to avail themselves of a package deal that will incorporate one-year’s worth of advertising, including guess editorials, and symposium support. This media package will be viewed as the incubator environment for savvy businesses to capitalize on the increasing interest in Digital Earth and the rapidly growing community of governments, industry, academics, and citizens. Those with newsworthy input for the Digital Earth enterprise are encourage to contact Ms. Yoo for more information regarding this media package and opportunities to contribute articles of interest.

Earth Observation Team Leaders

Professor John Townshend, Chairman, Department of Geography, University of Maryland, and Ms. Nancy Colleton, president Institute for Global Environmental Strategies have accepted leadership of the Earth Observation committee. Townshend’s stellar career in remote sensing and pioneering efforts to create the web-based Global Land Cover Facility (http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu) has help to advance the Earth Observation community into increased collaboration. Ms. Colleton has been leading the industry and NGO participation in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and is therefore a pivotal player in aligning Digital Earth with the various user community trajectories. This world-class team signifies solid integration of the remote sensing community for the ISDE5 event.

San Diego State University Visualization Center Adds Supercomputer to Network

Our mission to San Diego included a day at the Visualization Center where guru John Graham demonstrated extreme competence in applying the prowess of the San Diego Super Computer to the concepts and applications of the Digital Earth crowd. Professor Eric Frost, a co-director of the laboratory and Graham were in preparations for the Strong Angel III workshop and able to show off a set of very effective disaster response scenarios bringing together disparate remote sensing, topographic, and field data into a comprehensive decision support system. The elegance of their work is that the viability of extremely light clients to access the visualized information streamed over the web. Frost and Graham have agreed to support the ISDE5 event and Graham further promised to help lead a supercomputer backbone for the development of both the Digital Earth Exchange and host multiple “spinning globe” applications and data (e.g., Geofusion, World Wind, ArcGeoExplorer, Google, etc.).

Institute for the Future Scientist Mike Liebhold Collaborates for ISDE5

Palo Alto’s IFTF is not known to dwelling in the past and so it was a welcome addition to the ISDE5 team to discover the brilliant support of IFTF senior researcher, Mike Liebhold (www.iftf.org) . Mike’s brain simply works better than most when contemplating where we are going and how we are going into the future. Mike hosted a Digital Earth orientation meeting in June at the IFTF headquarters just outside the Stanford University campus that brought together an incredible collection of technology pioneers, movers, and shakers. Dr. Liebhold will continue to be a key player in helping to connect technology innovators into the Digital Earth community to capture the tremendous intellectual resources for our collective enterprise on Spaceship Earth.

ECAI Confirms Interest

The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative represents a consortium of architects, archaeologist, and librarians whose collective mission is to capture in rich 3-D form, the visualized creation of past events in space and time (ecaiweb@uclink.berkeley.edu and www.ecai.org). ECAI uses time and space to enhance understanding of past human cultures. With ECAI firmly set at UC Berkeley coincident with the ISDE5 venue setting, we can expect to benefit significantly from the experiences over the past few years. ECAI has been addressing technology infrastructure, creation of online projects and publications, developing standards and best practices, and a litany of collaboration issues that will provide excellent road maps for the Digital Earth community. We can easily envision an new and exciting Digital Earth with the augmentation of expertly created, rich visualization experiences for discovering more about our historic human cultural legacies.

Geo-Diva Blesses ISDE5

Bonnie DeVarco has been dubbed the Geo-Diva for Digital Earth by an august group of people who have followed and participated in her pioneering efforts to harness visualization technologies and various versions of digital earths for improving life on the planet. DeVarco, often accompanied by her SGI guru partner Tony, has been networking the best and brightest over the past ten years to get technologies up and running for industry and academics. Sitting at the nexus of various technical and social networks, Bonnie has been instrumental in delving deeply into the intellectual foundations of gee-whiz technology to create a solid framework from which to perceive the many modern wonders. Her work as a Buckminster Fuller scholar finds her at the Stanford University Fuller archives uncovering new revelations as to what Bucky was thinking when he described the Geoscope and resource gaming strategies. Ms. DeVarco has proven to be a deep pool of understanding and vision for the Digital Earth community attracting leading figures in the advance-technology community as well as key players of the futurists and humanities. DeVarco will be presenting a special Buckminster Fuller program at the San Francisco gala event.

Google Talks

Discussions with Google Headquarters leaders are ongoing for possibly hosting a public forum at the world-famous facility in Mountain View. Google has been hosting a variety of innovative gatherings and meetings and the fit would appear to be compatible. A representative from the Google Earth team indicated that a meeting with other senior officials would be set by early fall to workout details for the proposed venue.