RESEARCH ON THE PROGRESS AND DIRECTION OF DIGITAL CITY
MIAO Qian-jun a,c ’*, Li Deren b , TANG Yanli c
d Tsinghua University, P.R.China 100084 - miaoqianjun@vip.163.com
b State Key Laboratory for Information Engineering in Surveying,Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University,
P.R.China 430070
^Heilongjiang Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, P.R.China 150086
KEY WORDS: Digital City, Geo-information industry, Digital Navigation Map, Ubiquity, USDI
ABSTRACT:
With the development of information and communication technology, the construction of digital cities has become more feasible. It
is a powerful way to elevate the city’s strength, to improve the social environment and to promote national sustainable development.
This paper describes the digital city’s definition, content, frame, architecture, urban spatial data infrastructure (USDI) and discusses
the relations between digital city and USDI. Based on the significance and strategic prospect of digital city, the paper researches the
orientation of digital city in details. It also discusses the architecture of digital city according to its development trend. In the last part,
the five phases of digital city are comprehensively compared and analyzed.
1. INTRODUCTION
The construction of digital city is a hot topic on geographical
information sharing of current geomatics industry and
consistent with the construction of spatial data infrastructure.
The geomatics industry is closely related to the construction of
digital earth, the development of economic society and the
national defence, therefore the significance of constructing a
geographic spatial framework is obvious. In order to advance
the constmction of "digital earth", we need to speed up the
construction of digital city, especially enhance the service
ability of geomatics.
Digital city is an application of digital earth in cities. Integrated
with modem information technology, digital city will play an
important role in the process of geomatics development.
Two of the most powerful drivers of change within global
economies are the explosion of information technologies (or
digital technologies) and the shift towards sustainable
development. Both require us to rethink the nature of products
and services. Yet there have been surprisingly few attempts to
assess whether the information and sustainable development
revolutions will complement or conflict with one another.
Integration between the two agendas has been slow. Through
the implementation of Digital cities, this work will offer a
significant contribution to sustainable development.
The constmction of digital city has marched into a fast
implementation stage and simultaneously its process has been
unprecedentedly promoted. All this . indicates that the
development of digital city is marching into the breakthrough
scope and surmounting a historical opportunity. Therefore the
progress and direction of digital city are worth being discussed
and researched.
2. DIGITAL CITY AND ITS ARCHITECTURE
As a part of the information age, digital city’s functionalities
are to improve the city services, to elevate the quality of city
management, to improve the quality of people’s life and to
maintain the city environment. Therefore digital city plays a
very important role in the process of sustainable development.
2.1 Definition of Digital city
The digital earth is seen as a multi-resolution, three-dimensional
representation of the planet, into which vast quantities of geo-
referenced data can be embedded. In other words, digital earth
is an information nerval meshwork and digital city is a node in
the nerval meshwork.
Strictly speaking, the digital city is a dynamic concept, whose
definition is still evolving. But we can understand it as follow:
digital city is an open and complex application system based on
internet technology and city information resource. The digital
city must integrate with modem information technology and
communication technology. Its aim is to promote sustainable
development in the fields of environment, tourism, health,
technology, sport etc.
2.2 Content and Frame of Digital city
As a node of digital earth, digital city content and frame should
accord with digital earth. The content of digital earth consists of
infrastructure and application engineering. Infrastructure
includes Urban Information Infrastructure (UII) and Urban
Spatial Data Infrastructure (USDI). UII, or information highway,
is a network layer which consists of communication network
and computer network. USDI includes techniques, policies,
standards and manpower resource that are used in acquisition,
manage, store and distribution of spatial data. Application
engineering includes management of resources, environment,
society, economy, region, city and application aimed towards
government, enterprise and public services.
Therefore the contents and frame of digital city include
infrastructure and application engineering. The difference
between digital earth and digital city is only in scales. Digital
earth emphasize particularly on whole earth, digital city