GIScience research challenges for realizing discrete global grid systems as a Digital Earth

Increasing data resources are available for documenting and detecting changes in environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic processes. Currently, data are distributed across a wide variety of sources (e.g. data silos) and published in a variety of formats, scales, and semantic representations. A key issue, therefore, in building systems that can realize a vision of earth system monitoring remains data integration. Discrete global grid systems (DGGSs) have emerged as a key technology that can provide a common multi-resolution spatial fabric in support of Digital Earth monitoring. However, DGGSs remain in their infancy with many technical, conceptual, and operational challenges. With renewed interest in DGGS brought on by a recently proposed standard, the demands of big data, and growing needs for monitoring environmental changes across a variety of scales, we seek to highlight current challenges that we see as central to moving the field(s) and technologies of DGGS forward. For each of the identified challenges, we illustrate the issue and provide a potential solution using a reference DGGS implementation. Through articulation of these challenges, we hope to identify a clear research agenda, expand the DGGS research footprint, and provide some ideas for moving forward towards a scaleable Digital Earth vision. Addressing such challenges helps the GIScience research community to achieve the real benefits of DGGS and provides DGGS an opportunity to play a role in the next generation of GIS.