The 3rd Digital Earth Summit, organized by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) and University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy, (UACEG) Sofia was held in Nessebar, Bulgaria from 12th to 14th June, 2010.

This Summit focused on the theme of Digital Earth in the Service of Society: Sharing Information, Building Knowledge with topics covering societal context of Digital Earth, Digital Earth in sustainable development at local and regional levels, Digital cities, the citizen as contributor to Digital Earth, and so on.

With the development of spatial information technology, network communication technology and earth system science, the shared Digital Earth platforms for both public and commercial use have come into existence. The 3rd Digital Earth Summit offered people a great opportunity to think deeply about the role of Digital Earth in the society and in sustainable development at local and regional levels. Besides, the Summit plays an important role in promoting the idea of getting the public involved in Digital Earth science and technology.

Prof. GUO Huadong, Secretary-General of ISDE and Prof. Paul Hardy from ESRI gave keynote speeches during the Summit, respectively. GUO’s report is about Decadal Development and Future of Digital Earth. He briefly introduced the initiative of Digital Earth, in terms of what is Digital Earth, how Digital Earth concepts comes into people’s minds, and several Digital Earth key technologies, etc. Then he presented an ongoing development of the International Society for Digital Earth, the series International Symposium on Digital Earth and Digital Earth Summits, and the official journal of ISDE – the International Journal of Digital Earth (IJDE). As a significant part of his report, Prof. GUO prospected the future of Digital Earth. He showed an outlook of how to make advantages of modern technologies into Digital Earth, such as cloud computing, the internet of things, WEB2.0 etc., in order to monitor the global change in an effective and efficient way. And then Prof. Paul Hardy gave a report on Digital Earth: Collecting, Connecting, Analyzing, and Action.

There are nearly 100 researchers from 11 countries registered at this submit and about 40 scholars gave presentations concerning the frontier research on Digital Earth science and technology at the Summit.

During the Summit, the 5th ISDE Executive Committee Meeting and the Round Table Discussion on Digital Earth in Europe were successfully held, respectively.