Innovation in geoprocessing for a Digital Earth

Abstract

Online geoprocessing, the provision and the use of spatial analysis functionality on the Web, is a powerful technological approach to fully realise the vision of a Digital Earth. The Digital Earth objectives include the integration of information across diverse domains in order to address environmental and societal challenges as well as the interactive and exploratory provision of information to a wide audience (Craglia et al. 2008). In research and science contexts, Digital Earth may be seen as ‘ world-wide laboratories ’ to enable collaborative research, exploration, reproduction and validation of theoretical and practical research constructs related to phenomena that leave spatio-temporal traces. Behind the scenes, approaches to support efficient and reliable online geoprocessing that alleviate the tension between the access to multiple and disparate spatial data sources and that support the coherent exploration of these data sources for knowledge discovery are more necess- ary than ever. Progress on online geoprocessing approaches is thus absolutely necessary, almost imperative, to turn Digital Earth ’ s vision and objectives into tangible, usable ‘ tools ’ that for instance allow research teams to perform multi-disciplinary research or ease the ad hoc and timely generation of tailored information for citizens and in sum ensure the advancement of our body of knowledge (Bernard et al. 2014). This special issue provides a state-of-the-art overview on recent developments and real-world applications of online geoprocessing in the view of the given objectives. In the following, we briefly present the seven contributions to this special issue. Subsequently, we discuss trends in research in the area of online geoprocessing.