GIScience research challenges for realizing discrete global grid systems as a Digital Earth

Increasing data resources are available for documenting and detecting changes in environmental,ecological,and socioeconomic processes.Currently,data are distributed across a wide variety of sources(e.g.data silos)and published in a variety of formats,scales,and semantic representations.A key issue,therefore,in building systems that can realize a vision of earth system monitoring remains data integration.Discrete global grid systems(DGGSs)have emerged as a key technology that can provide a common multi-resolution spatial fabric in support of Digital Earth monitoring.However,DGGSs remain in their infancy with many technical,conceptual,and operational challenges.With renewed interest in DGGS brought on by a recently proposed standard,the demands of big data,and growing needs for monitoring environmental changes across a variety of scales,we seek to highlight current challenges that we see as central to moving the field(s)and technologies of DGGS forward.For each of the identified challenges,we illustrate the issue and provide a potential solution using a reference DGGS implementation.Through articulation of these challenges,we hope to identify a clear research agenda,expand the DGGS research footprint,and provide some ideas for moving forward towards a scaleable Digital Earth vision.Addressing such challenges helps the GIScience research community to achieve the real benefits of DGGS and provides DGGS an opportunity to play a role in the next generation of GIS.

A novel method of determining the optimal polyhedral orientation for discrete global grid systems applicable to regionalscale areas of interest

The polyhedral discrete global grid system(DGGS)is a multi-resolution discrete earth reference model supporting the fusion and processing of multi-source geospatial information.The orientation of the polyhedron relative to the earth is one of its key design choices,used when constructing the grid system,as the efficiency of indexing will decrease if local areas of interest extend over multiple faces of the spherical polyhedron.To date,most research has focused on global-scale applications while almost no rigorous mathematical models have been established for determining orientation parameters.In this paper,we propose a method for determining the optimal polyhedral orientation of DGGSs for areas of interest on a regional scale.The proposed method avoids splitting local or regional target areas across multiple polyhedral faces.At the same time,it effectively handles geospatial data at a global scale because of the inherent characteristics of DGGSs.Results show that the orientation determined by this method successfully guarantees that target areas are located at the center of a single polyhedral face.The orientation process determined by this novel method reduces distortions and is more adaptable to different geographical areas,scales,and base polyhedrons than those employed by existing procedures.

An optimized hexagonal quadtree encoding and operation scheme for icosahedral hexagonal discrete global grid systems

Although research on the discrete global grid systems (DGGSs) has become an essential issue in the era of big earth data,there is still a gap between the efficiency of current encoding and operation schemes for hexagonal DGGSs and the needs of practical applications. This paper proposes a novel and efficient encoding and operation scheme of an optimized hexagonal quadtree structure (OHQS) based on aperture 4 hexagonal discrete global grid systems by translation transformation. A vector model is established to describe and calculate the aperture 4 hexagonal grid system. This paper also provides two different grid code addition algorithms based on induction and ijk coordinate transformation. We implement the transformation between OHQS codes and geographic coordinates through the ij,ijk and IJK coordinate systems. Compared with existing schemes,the scheme in this paper greatly improves the efficiency of the addition operation,neighborhood retrieval and coordinate transformation,and the coding is more concise than other aperture 4 hexagonal DGGSs. The encoding operation based on the ijk coordinate system is faster than the encoding operation based on the induction and addition table. Spatial modeling based OHQS DGGSs are also provided. A case study with rainstorms demonstrated the availability of this scheme.

EASE-DGGS:a hybrid discrete global grid system for Earth sciences

Although we live in an era of unprecedented quantities and access to data,deriving actionable information from raw data is a hard problem.Earth observation systems(EOS)have experienced rapid growth and uptake in recent decades,and the rate at which we obtain remotely sensed images is increasing.While significant effort and attention has been devoted to designing systems that deliver analytics ready imagery faster,less attention has been devoted to developing analytical frameworks that enable EOS to be seamlessly integrated with other data for quantitative analysis.Discrete global grid systems(DGGS)have been proposed as one potential solution that addresses the challenge of geospatial data integration and interoperability.Here,we propose the systematic extension of EASE-Grid in order to provide DGGS-like characteristics for EOS data sets.We describe the extensions as well as present implementation as an application programming interface(API),which forms part of the University of Minnesota’s GEMS(Genetic x Environment x Management x Socioeconomic)Informatics Center’s API portfolio.