Open Geospatial Science - Calling for a Digital Earth Laboratory in Europe

Nowadays, geospatial data management and handling facilities are supposed to break existing silos, address new audiences, and meet challenges of increased data variety, velocity and volume. A next generation of (digital) science and supporting e-infrastructures has to emerge in order to provide the required capabilities and capacities, including service interoperability, transparency, repeatability of experiments and reproducibility of scientific findings. This paper calls for a 'Digital Earth Laboratory' as a means to exploit the major challenges, share observations, experiments and their results, and facilitate collaboration in an open environment. We particularly (i) argue for a European focus, building on initiatives such as INSPIRE, GEOSS and Copernicus; (ii) sketch the early development status; and (iii) post major questions which will have to be addressed for a stepwise realization of our proposal.

SCHADE Sven; 

2014-08-18

Jacobs University

JRC90811