academia brought together by the Vespucci Initiative for the Advancement of Geographic Information Science, and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission recently published "Next-Generation Digital Earth" a position paper that suggests its eight key elements: Not one Digital Earth, but multiple connected globes/infrastructures addressing the needs of different audiences: citizens, communities, policymakers, scientists, educationalists. Problem oriented: e.g. environment, health, societal benefit areas, and transparent on the impacts of technologies on the environment Allowing search through time and space to find similar/analogue situations with real time data from both sensors and humans (different from what existing GIS can do, and different from adding analytical functions to a virtual globe) Asking questions about change, identification of anomalies in space in both human and environmental domains (flag things that are not consistent with their surroundings in real time) Enabling access to data, information, services, and models as well as scenarios and forecasts: from simple queries to complex analyses across the environmental and social domains. Supporting the visualization of abstract concepts and data types (e.g. low income, poor health, and semantics) Based on open access, and participation across multiple technological platforms, and media (e.g. text, voice and multi-media) Engaging, interactive, exploratory, and a laboratory for learning and for multidisciplinary education and science. Key developments Significant progress towards Digital Earth has been achieved over the last decade as collected in a survey paper by Mahdavi-Amiri et al., including work in these categories: Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) The number of Spatial Data Infrastructures has grown steadily since the early 1990s, aided in part by interoperability standards maintained by the Open Geospatial Consortium and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Significant recent efforts to link and coordinate SDI's include Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) and the UNSDI Initiative of the UN Geographic Information Working Group (UNIGWG). Between 1998 and 2001, the NASA-chaired Interagency Digital Earth Working Group (IDEW) contributed to this growth with a particular focus on interoperability issues, giving rise to the Web Map Service standard among others. Geobrowsers The scientific use of geo-browser virtual globes such as Google Earth, NASA's World Wind, and ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer has grown significantly as their functionality has improved and with the KML format having become the de facto standard for globe visualizations. Numerous examples can be viewed at the Google Earth Outreach Showcase and at the World Wind Java Demo Applications and Applets. Sensor networks