躬自厚而薄责于人阿尔·戈尔数字地球：认识二十一世纪我们所居住的星球（有中文翻译）
The Digital Earth: Understanding Our Planet in 21st Century
眼部刮痧数字地球：认识二十一世纪我们所居住的星球
Al GORE七星茶
阿尔·戈尔
A new wave of technological innovation is allowing us to capture, store, process and display an unprecedented amount of information about our planet and a wide variety of environmental and cultural phenomena. Much of this information will be "georeferenced" - that is, it will refer to some specific place on the Earth's surface.
The hard part of taking advantage of this flood of geospatial information will be making n of it. - turning raw data into understandable information. Today, we often find that we have more information than we know what to do with. The Landsat program, designed to he
大大小小是成语吗lp us understand the global environment, is a good example. The Landsat satellite is capable of taking a complete photograph of the entire planet every two weeks, and it's been collecting data for more than 20 years. In spite of the great need for that information, the vast majority of tho images have never fired a single neuron in a single human brain. Instead, they are stored in electronic silos of data. We ud to have an agricultural policy where we stored grain in Midwestern silos and let it rot while millions of people starved to death. Now we have an insatiable hunger for knowledge. Yet a great deal of data remains unud.
Part of the problem has to do with the way information is displayed. Someone once said that if we tried to describe the human brain in computer terms, it looks as if we have a low bit rate, but very high resolution. For example, rearchers have long known that we have trouble remembering more than ven pieces of data in our short-term memory. That's a low bit rate. On the other hand, we can absorb billions of bits of information instantly if they are arrayed in a recognizable pattern within which each bit gains meaning in relation to all the others a human face, or a galaxy of stars.
The tools we have most commonly ud to interact with data, such as the "desktop metaphor" employed by the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, are not really suited to this new challenge. I believe we need a "Digital Earth". A multi-resolution, three-dimensional reprentation of the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data.
Imagine, for example, a young child going to a Digital Earth exhibit at a local muum. After donning a head-mounted display, she es Earth as it appears from space. Using a data glove, she zooms in, using higher and higher levels of resolution, to e continents, then regions, countries, cities, and finally individual hous, trees, and other natural and man-made objects. Having found an area of the planet she is interested in exploring, she takes the equivalent of a "magic carpet ride" through a 3-D visualization of the terrain. Of cour, terrain is only one of the many kin
gta5中文ds of data with which she can interact. Using the systems' voice recognition capabilities, she is able to request information on land cover, distribution of plant and animal species,
real-time weather, roads, political boundaries, and population. She can also visualize the environmental information that she and other students all over the world have collected as part of the GLOBE project. This information can be amlessly fud with the digital map or terrain data. She can get more information on many of the objects she es by using her data glove to click on a hyperlink. To prepare for her family's vacation to Yellowstone National Park, for example, she plans the perfect hike to the geyrs, bison, and bighorn sheep that she has just read about. In fact, she can follow the trail visually from start to finish before she ever leaves the muum in her hometown.
She is not limited to moving through space, but can also travel through time. After taking a virtual field-trip to Paris to visit the Louvre, she moves backward in time to learn about French history, perusing digitized maps overlaid on the surface of the Digital Earth, newsreel footage, oral history, newspapers and other primary sources. She nds some of this information to her personal e-mail address to study later. The time-line, which stretches off in the distance, can be t for days, years, centuries, or even geological epochs, for tho occasions when she wants to learn more about dinosaurs.灿烂的星空
Obviously, no one organization in government, industry or academia could undertake such a project. Like the World Wide Web, it would require the grassroots efforts of hundreds of thousands of individuals, companies, university rearchers, and government organizations. Although some of the data for the Digital Earth would be in the public domain, it might also become a digital marketplace for companies lling a vast array of commercial imagery and value-added information rvices. It could also become a "collaboratory"—a laboratory without walls for rearch scientists eking to understand the complex interaction between humanity and our environment.简历助手
Technologies needed for a Digital Earth
李易安Although this scenario may em like science fiction, most of the technologies and capabilities that would be required to build a Digital Earth are either here or under development. Of cour, the capabilities of a Digital Earth will continue to evolve over time. What we will be able to do in 2005 will look primitive compared to the Digital Earth of the year 2020. Below are just a few of the technologies that are needed:
Computational Science: Until the advent of computers, both experimental and theoretical ways of creating knowledge have been limited. Many of the phenomena that experimental scientists would like to study are too hard to obrve - they may be too small or too large, too fast or too slow, occurring in a billionth of a cond or over a billion years. Pure theory, on the other ha
