Digital Earth is the name given to a concept by former US vice president Al Gore in 1998, describing a virtual representation of the Earth that is georeferenced and connected to the world's digital knowledge archives. Concept Original vision In a speech prepared for the California Science Center in Los Angeles on January 31, 1998, Gore described a digital future where schoolchildren - indeed all the world's citizens - could interact with a computer-generated three-dimensional spinning virtual globe and access vast amounts of scientific and cultural information to help them understand the Earth and its human activities. The greater part of this knowledge store would be free to all via the Internet, however a commercial marketplace of related products and services was envisioned to co-exist, in part in order to support the expensive infrastructure such a system would require. The origin of the idea can be traced back to Buckminster Fuller's Geoscope, a large spherical display to represent geographic phenomena. Many aspects of his proposal have been realized - for instance, virtual globe geo-browsers such as NASA World Wind, Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Maps 3D for commercial, social and scientific applications. But the Gore speech outlined a truly global, collaborative linking of systems that has yet to happen. That vision has been continually interpreted and defined by the growing global community of interest described below. The Digital Earth imagined in the speech has been defined as an "organizing vision" to steer scientists and technologists towards a shared goal, promising substantial advances in many scientific and engineering areas, similar to the Information superhighway. An emerging view Two noteworthy excerpts from the Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth, ratified September 12, 2009 at the 6th International Symposium on Digital Earth in Beijing: "Digital Earth is an integral part of other advanced technologies including: earth observation, geo-information systems, global positioning systems, communication networks, sensor webs, electromagnetic identifiers, virtual reality, grid computation, etc. It is seen as a global strategic contributor to scientific and technological developments, and will be a catalyst in finding solutions to international scientific and societal issues." "Digital Earth should play a strategic and sustainable role in addressing such challenges to human society as natural resource depletion, food and water insecurity, energy shortages, environmental degradation, natural disasters response, population explosion, and, in particular, global climate change." Next-generation digital Earth A group of international geographic and environmental scientists from government, industry, and