International Journal of Digital Earth (Taylor & Francis) – Special issue on “Storage, Integration and Processing of Digital Earth Data”

Guest editors:

François Pinet, Irstea, Clermont-Ferrand France.

Sandro Bimonte, Irstea, Clermont-Ferrand France.

Petraq Papajorgji, Canadian Institute of Technology, Albania.

Submission deadline : Sept. 30th, 2014

Digital Earth is the name given to a concept used for “describing a virtual representation of the Earth that is geo-referenced and connected to the world’s digital knowledge archives”. A very large amount of data is produced to represent multiple facets of our planet. As a result of continuous developments and massive use of new information and communication technologies, there is a considerable increase in sources of geo-referenced data. In recent years, new scientific and technological advances in the fields of sensors networks, remote sensing systems, spatial data infrastructures, Web technologies and volunteer geographical systems have increased the availability of spatial information at different geographical scales. Advances in computing have also enabled scientists to develop complex models for simulating earth phenomena (e.g., global climate change) that produce a huge volume of data. All these information require effective storage methods, as well as designing effective integration and processing techniques. New database technologies must be invented to better represent the complexity of spatial data (e.g., uncertainty; complex structures), to guarantee the quality of integrated data and to process the huge amount of information available (e.g., use of spatial data warehouses; non-relational databases; processing of raster databases or continuous fields).

The purpose of this special issue is to present the latest advances in the field of spatial databases for digital earth (focusing on data storage, integration and processing). Various application areas can be presented (earth observation, geosciences, environment, agriculture, natural hazards, etc.). The main topics of the special issue will be:

- Databases for storing data produced from remote sensing systems

- Storage of data collected by sensors networks

- Spatial data query and aggregations in large infrastructures (relational databases, No SQL, etc.)

- Continuous fields and raster databases: representation, map algebra and performance issues

- Spatial data integration and Extraction-Transformation-Loading tools

- Efficient storage, integration and processing of volunteered geographic information

- Spatial data warehouses and Online Analytical Processing tools

- New spatial data standards and infrastructures

- Spatial data quality management and integrity constraints

- Spatial “big data”

- Spatial data storage in cloud computing

- Spatial databases of simulation results

- Digital earth data and ontologies

- Spatial data mining in digital earth data

- New conceptual, logical and physical spatial data representations

- New models for representing uncertain spatial data

- etc.

The paper submission deadline is: Sept. 30th, 2014. Authors will submit their manuscripts on-line (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tjde20).

Submission instructions will be provided shortly.