数字地球将为人类提供关于我们地球的海量自然和人文数据与信息 ,是我们生活的行星的一个多分辨率 ,四维虚拟表达。网格计算被认为是解决数字地球问题的最好方法。数字地球问题的解决必须通过异构的计算资源 ,信息系统 ,设备 ,人之间的相互协作 ,而这些都是地理位置或组织结构分散的。本文介绍我们在生成用于解决数字地球问题的核心中间件的研究工作以及结果。因为网格计算本身是一门比较新的领域 ,网格计算与数字地球的有机结合将为数字地球提供一个全新的计算工具

Digital Earth will be a multi resolution, four dimensional virtual representation of our planet that enables a person to explore and interact with the vast amounts of natural and cultural information gathered about the Earth. It needs Interactive 3 D visualisation, display and navigation through immersed and non immersed environments; it also needs high performance computation to create derived information and model simulations on demand, storage and real time access to very large, multi resolution datasets, fusion of satellite imagery and other geo referenced data sources of diverse content, satellite and terrestrial broadband networks for high data rate transmission, interaction, and collaboration, standards and metadata for interoperability among and access to differing geo spatial databases are inevitable. Digital Earth concept becomes an international cooperative program instead of merely one country's initiative. So far, Grid technique is the best solution for Digital Earth. Digiatl Earth can only be done through the interaction of people, heterogeneous computing resources, information systems, and instruments, all of which are geographically and organizationally dispersed. Earth observation includes information acquisition, processing and applications. Information acquisition provides a vast amount of spatial adta for building the fabric resource infrastructure. Information processing means that spatial information processing middleware is used with distributed large, secure grid computing resources for real time processing of all kinds of spatial data. With the help of GIS, we are currently working on the development of core middleware for Earth observation data processing and applications. The results will be available soon.