Research on the Digital Holographic Earth Data Cube Model

With the development of big data and artificial intelligence, the scope of digital earth modeling has extended to full-time holography beyond the earth surface. However, the current data model of digital earth still remains in the data modelling of earth tile or grid subdivision. This model severely limits the application of scenario-based and intelligent digital earth development. This paper proposes the concept of digital holographic earth and a corresponding data organization model of earth data cube. By using global multi-level grid reference system to describe and express multi-scale space and using two or three-dimensional grid cells to describe spatial positions, the traditional spatiotemporal description of "longitude, latitude, elevation, and time" is transformed to a new spatiotemporal description system of "time granularity, time coverage, grid position, and grid scale". The proposed model is characterized by the dimensions of "time-space-scale-attribute" based on spatiotemporal big data in the digital earth. The model encapsulates vectors, rasters, grids, time series arrays, and 3D models into an unified system. This unified system ensures that any data value of a specific earth data cube is aligned perfectly in time, space, and scale, which solves the problem of multi-dimensional or spatiotemporal dynamic fusion of big earth data. Finally, this paper develops a deep- time and spatiotemporal dynamic visualization simulation system to verify the data model based on the requirements of the Deep-time Digital Earth International Science Program. © 2023 Journal of Geo-Information Science. All rights reserved.