GEOSENSING SYSTEMS ENGINEERING FOR OCEAN SECURITY AND SUSTAINABLE COASTAL ZONE MANAGEMENT

Three major threats to ocean security and coastal zone sustainability - global warming, the loss of ocean biodiversity, and pollution - are combining to threaten the ecological integrity of our marine environment and life support systems. We put forward a geomatics-based systems engineering architecture to identify the location and extent of oil spills, thereby improving the ecological integrity of the world＇s oceans and helping contingency planners to determine required assets, personnel and other resources. This real-time, event-based and cost effective emergency management decision support system can aid in the classification, detection, and monitoring of oil spills in the marine environment. The developed Synthetic-Aperture Radar （SAR） processing and calibration techniques efficiently monitor environmental changes in inaccessible ocean regions, characterize oil spill scenarios, and help to identify spill sources. The system is used to improve emergency management in the Gulf of Mexico, with application to oil spills arising from Hurricane Katrina.

An IEEE value loop of human-technology collaboration in geospatial information science

Geosensing and social sensing as two digitalization mainstreams in big data era are increasingly converging toward an integrated system for the creation of semantically enriched digital Earth.Along with the rapid developments of AI technologies,this convergence has inevitably brought about a number of transformations.On the one hand,value-adding chains from raw data to products and services are becoming value-adding loops composed of four successive stages–Informing,Enabling,Engaging and Empowering(IEEE).Each stage is a dynamic loop for itself.On the other hand,the“human versus technology”relationship is upgraded toward a game-changing“human and technology”collaboration.The information loop is essentially shaped by the omnipresent reciprocity between humans and technologies as equal partners,co-learners and co-creators of new values.The paper gives an analytical review on the mutually changing roles and responsibilities of humans and technologies in the individual stages of the IEEE loop,with the aim to promote a holistic understanding of the state of the art of geospatial information science.Meanwhile,the author elicits a number of challenges facing the interwoven human-technology collaboration.The transformation to a growth mind-set may take time to realize and consolidate.Research works on large-scale semantic data integration are just in the beginning.User experiences of geovisual analytic approaches are far from being systematically studied.Finally,the ethical concerns for the handling of semantically enriched digital Earth cover not only the sensitive issues related to privacy violation,copyright infringement,abuse,etc.but also the questions of how to make technologies as controllable and understandable as possible for humans and how to keep the technological ethos within its constructive sphere of societal influence.