Digital Earth's Nervous System for crisis events: real-time Sensor Web Enablement of Volunteered Geographic Information

Digital Earth (DE) is a powerful metaphor for the organisation and access to digital information through a multi-scale three-dimensional representation of the globe. Recent progress gave a concrete body to this vision. However, this body is not yet self-aware: further integration of the temporal and voluntary dimension is needed to better portray the event-based nature of our world. We thus aim to extend DE vision with a Nervous System in order to provide decision makers with improved alerting mechanisms. Practical applications are foreseen for crisis management, where up-to-date situational awareness is needed. While it is traditionally built through trusted sources, citizens can play a complementary role by providing geo-referenced information known as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Although workflows have been implemented to create, validate and distribute VGI datasets for various thematic domains, its exploitation in real time and its integration into existing concepts of DE, such as spatial data infrastructures, still needs to be further addressed. In this paper we suggest to bridge this gap through Sensor Web Enablement for VGI, where VGI sensing becomes a sense of the DE's Nervous System. We discuss this approach and its applicability in the context of a forest fire scenario.