"Outstanding Paper" Award: "Think global, cube local: an Earth Observation Data Cube’s contribution to the Digital Earth vision”

The International Society for Digital Earth, in collaboration with Taylor & Francis and International Research Center of Big Data for Sustainable Development Goals, announced a new award series for authors publishing in Big Earth Data: Best and Outstanding Paper Awards. For the 2022 award, papers published online between 1 January and 31 December 2022 were evaluated by the Journal Award Committee. They selected three papers as ‘Best Papers’ and awarded one the honour of ‘Outstanding Paper’ for the year.

The papers have been selected by the Journal Award Committee according to the following criteria:

• Scientific merit and broad impact;
• Originality of the research objectives;
• Novelty in the opinions or in the research approaches;
• Quality and accessibility of the data set and software tools;
• Significance to the research filed and interest to readers;
• Clarity of presentation;
• Citations and downloads.

The Award Committee selected three papers as ‘Best Papers’. Among them, only one article has been selected as the ‘Outstanding Paper’ for the year.

 Dr. Gregory Giuliani has been part of an international team of authors (from the University of Salzburg, NASA, and Geoscience Australia) that won the “Outstanding Paper” award for 2022 with their paper entitled "Think global, cube local: an Earth Observation Data Cube’s contribution to the Digital Earth vision”.

Link to the announcement

Link to the paper

In this paper, authors have investigated how local Earth Observations data cubes can contribute to the global vision of the Digital Earth that Al Gore formalised 25 years ago. They looked at five perspectives (science, business and industry, government and policy, education, communities and citizens) and illustrated with four examples covering three continents at different geographic scales (Swiss Data Cube, semantic EO data cube for Austria, DE Africa, Virginia Data Cube).

Authors argued that blurring the dichotomy between global and local aligns with the DE vision to access the world’s knowledge and explore information about the planet.

The Big Earth Data is an interdisciplinary, open access and peer-reviewed academic journal, also the world's first big data journal in the Earth sciences. It was launched in 2017 by the International Society for Digital Earth jointly with the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences – Chinese Academy of Sciences Strategic Priority Research Program "Big Earth Data Science Engineering" and the Taylor & Francis Group. It is indexed in ESCI, Scopus, EI, Inspec, CSCD and other international databases.

It is ranked among the best journals in the fields of: Computer Science, Information Systems; Geosciences, Multidisciplinary; and Remote Sensing.