Digital Earth in a User-Centric Perspective

At the present, we are in the midst of another major societal shift that is leading to a hyper-connected society. In this hyper-connected society, the convergence of mobile technology, online access and global media is connecting masses of people without precedents, with resulting impacts on communication, content creation and social engagement. In this manuscript, we propose a conceptual framework that leverages the trend of sharing videos recorded with mobile devices, to turn the real-space surrounding us into a "virtual stage" for ubiquitous media-sharing. Automatic 3D reconstruction of events and places will follow from user-generated content, to foster new forms of spatial-temporal augmented content -- a Digital Earth. Three strategies essential to this framework are presented and discussed: the convergence of Big Data and Crowdsourcing, proactive policies, and Big Data capability through user engagement.