Tom Taylor is from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and is leading the formulation of NASA's Digital Earth Office at Goddard. Tom works with Tim Foresman in developing NASA's Digital Earth Program, and is working with several other government agencies and private organizations in implementing the national Digital Earth Initiative. He is presenting the talk for Tim Foresman, who was unable to come.
I apologize for Tim not making it; he really regrets it tremendously. As mentioned, I'm responsible for putting together what's called the Digital Earth office at Goddard Space Flight Center that NASA Headquarters has asked us to do. What I want to do is talk a little bit about Digital Earth from the view point of NASA and what we're doing, and hopefully that will help in your process.
As far as we're concerned, Digital Earth started back roughly with the Vice President's speech in January 1998 where he discussed what the vision of Digital Earth is: a multi-resolution three-dimensional representation; multiple resolutions; traveling temporally as well as spatially, and being a multi-port access to an average individual. That was the original intent. The way we envision Digital Earth is through various scenarios, such as access for middle schools to be able to get to data - to be able to find out about the Lewis and Clark path; a state disaster team trying to get information to respond to a tornado; a public auditorium where individuals learn what it looks like to see Earth from space; a museum display. It all comes down to access by the average individual, by government, by industry, by the commercial world, by academia. The study of Earth requires us to look at many levels of details. At NASA we have a unique perspective looking at it from space. But in reality it flows down to a closer level - at a national level, down to an urban level such as a city or a region, and ultimately to a local level where it affects individuals one on one.
What I want to talk about is how Digital Earth is envisioned as far NASA is concerned. You know it is a unique perspective from space that NASA brings to it. It allows us to demonstrate technology that engages more than just the fingers on the keyboard - all the senses. It allows us to bring together virtually many databases that are dispersed to provide not only information but also knowledge. It allows us to investigate things through interoperability, and that has been discussed several times this morning as a key point of Digital Earth. What it really does is to allow a new sustainable marketplace to be developed as a byproduct of this and allows us to manage the resources we have in Earth. A lot of people, at least in the process that we have gone through in formulating the Digital Earth office in NASA, have asked - why can't we do it today? It exists, the information is there, and things like that. But what's really missing is interoperability. The capability to bring together many datasets. What's missing is the common vision, the leadership, to activate the many organizations, the many entities, to come to a common goal. We have low awareness and little accessibility by the average individual. What we find is that we may be creating something that the average individual doesn't know about, doesn't care about, or we may be feeding them something they don't want - and that's a very critical part of Digital Earth.
As a community, Digital Earth represents internationally a lot of activities; nationally across the United States it represents many organizations, both government and non-government; and at the state and local level activities agencies want to be involved in order to better manage resources within their borders.
It was mentioned earlier about NSDI and the seven datasets they have. I agree with Mike Goodchild who mentioned this earlier that it is a great starting point - it doesn't necessarily do everything but it is a very strong foundation that we can build upon.
Now Tim generated a chart once that was supposed to demonstrate is what Digital Earth is envisioned to be and that it is more encompassing perhaps than single elements that exist today. Something that crosses the bounds from organization to organization through policies - something encompassing across the board. That's what is unique to Digital Earth, as compared to other things that are evolving. At NASA, what we have done is to structure ourselves into areas of vested interest or regions of influence - areas such as standards and architecture, data access and distribution, visualization and exploration, education and outreach, advanced display systems, and science and applications. These are what NASA feels we need to focus our resources on.
If you were to look at those individual areas, and I'm not going to go through them in great detail, we envision it as a customer and the interface we use to work with that customer. Education and outreach is focused on users, scenarios, partnerships and we get through to those customers through museums, schools, and the media. Science and applications is the validation community, and we get through to those individuals through the scientists, state and local government, and commercial applications. Visualization and exploration is focused on the methods, the hardware and the software. It involves the information and science technology companies that exist. If you were to look at advanced display sites, what we are focusing on is projects, testbed prototypes and facilities through which we can demonstrate Digital Earth. And at the moment we are working through the NASA centers and the resources they provide, and the museums. Data access and distribution are the gatherers, the distributors of that information. At the moment, we have the ESIPs and the DAACs. Standards and architectures is focusing on what would enable an infrastructure to create a sustainable Digital Earth, and basically it involves a lot of the organizations that we have heard today - the OGC, the FGDC - organizations like that.
Digital Earth is a community at the international, national and local level. Internationally there is a great awareness that is evolving about Digital Earth: creation of global datasets, developing standards and protocols in order to come across those multiple organizations that I spoke about. An awareness - there are international symposiums that are being put together. And they are flowing down to the social and economic impacts and what Digital Earth will do to those individuals.
Nationally - and by the way there are several individuals in the room who can speak to the national effort that's involved - we have held seven interagency working groups, involving a variety of agencies such as DARPA, EPA, FGDC, NASA, NIMA, and so on. We are proposing a structure to try to facilitate Digital Earth as a national initiative, and that's being worked on as we speak. Within NASA we are establishing a Digital Earth office and that is my responsibility at this moment to focus on NASA itself. The national effort is beginning to fund a lot of activities. Two of them are the DIRM, a reference model, and the Web Mapping Testbed that Cliff spoke about earlier, which is significant at the national level, and I thoroughly agree with everything that Cliff was saying. What he didn't tell you is that there is Web Mapping Testbed 2. It isn't the end; it's only the beginning.
With current state and local activities, what you're seeing is those communities getting involved and creating some kind of infrastructure. They are holding workshops. They are coming up with common products across the states that can be addressed. They are looking at pilot projects. They are trying to train their individuals in an infrastructure and build a work force. They are trying to educate the individuals within the state and local community as to what Digital Earth is.
What Digital Earth is has been addressed several times this morning. It is really interoperability that was discussed in the Vice President's speech; it's a common vision - those scenarios that I presented earlier. More than anything else, it is the involvement and the support of what we consider the average citizen - and I think that our focus in Digital Earth is how to get this global information across to the average citizen.
There is a national web page that Goddard maintains for the national effort. If you go to it, you will find lots of information about where we're headed and what's going on and future activities that are happening. I would recommend that you go look at that. Again, what Tim wanted to get across is that Digital Earth is active, proceeding, formulating, and I think has significant interface with this activity that is going on with the gazetteer.
Thank you.