Digital Earth will be a multi resolution

four dimensional virtual representation of our planet that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast amounts of natural and cultural information gathered about the Earth. It needs Interactive 3 D visualisation

display and navigation through immersed and non immersed environments; it also needs high performance computation to create derived information and model simulations on demand

storage and real time access to very large

multi resolution datasets

fusion of satellite imagery and other geo referenced data sources of diverse content

satellite and terrestrial broadband networks for high data rate transmission

interaction

and collaboration

standards and metadata for interoperability among and access to differing geo spatial databases are inevitable. Digital Earth concept becomes an international cooperative program instead of merely one country’s initiative. So far

Grid technique is the best solution for Digital Earth. Digiatl Earth can only be done through the interaction of people

heterogeneous computing resources

information systems

and instruments

all of which are geographically and organizationally dispersed. Earth observation includes information acquisition

processing and applications. Information acquisition provides a vast amount of spatial adta for building the fabric resource infrastructure. Information processing means that spatial information processing middleware is used with distributed large

secure grid computing resources for real time processing of all kinds of spatial data. With the help of GIS

we are currently working on the development of core middleware for Earth observation data processing and applications. The results will be available soon.