The Theory & Practice Of "Digital City"

After it was conceived, the concept of "digital earth" has attracted great attention from all countries of the world and has also received warm response from political, academic and industrial areas of these different countries. Since then, a group of correlative concepts, such as "digital nation", "digital city", "digital community", "digital industry" and so on, have been derived from it. "Digital city", however, is an important component of "digital earth", as it is a specific materialization of "digital earth" in a city, a strategic target of urban informationization and an important logo of urban modernization. Building a "digital city" is not merely a self-requirement for accelerating urban modernization; it is further more a necessary option for a city to strengthen its comprehensive competitiveness. Forming a "digital city" will change the tradition of production and life style, enrich both material and cultural life of people, and promote a healthy economic development and an overall improvement of the society.This paper, taking "digital Shanghai" as an example, has explored and studied the theoretic fundamentals, critical technologies and construction practices for building up a "digital City". The paper consists of five chapters. Chapter One has elaborated the theoretic fundamentals for building up a "digital city" based on its initial background, basic concepts, current developing status, and its important significance. Chapter Two has illustrated the critical technologies that support a "digital city" in such areas as global positioning system, remote sensing, geographic information system, metadata and massdata processing, data warehouse and data mining, data fusion with virtual reality, and interoperation with hyperlink. Chapter Three has, according to the writer's understanding of the concept of "digital city", brought forward an elementary framework for building up "digital Shanghai" in the consideration of the existing infrastructure, technical condition, managerial system and also its level of informationization in Shanghai. Chapter Four has, taking the database of Shanghai digital topographical map, database of digital remote sensing, basic geographic element code standards, and construction of geographic database of population resources as examples, fully illustrated the constructive practices of a fundamental data platform of Shanghai Urban Geographic Information System, which is a basic engineering project of "digital Shanghai". Starting from the areas of constituting the digit standards of geographic information metadata, designing metadata warehouse, developing metadata operation tools and building up metadata warehouse in Shanghai urban construction. Chapter Five has further described the construction and implementation of database of the geographic spatial information metadata in Shanghai urban construction, one of the information sharing tools in "digital Shanghai". Through the discussion and study on its theory, technology and implementation of a "digital city" in above-mentioned chapters, the paper has provided an overall methodology, a structural framework, an implementing approach...