On Sep 12th, the 6th International Symposium on Digital Earth (ISDE6), lasting 4 days, comes to an end successfully in the afternoon. More than 500 participants have attended the closing ceremony and adopted the Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth’ 2009 – a programmatic document intended for a new stage of developing the Digital Earth.

Handover of the ISDE flag

The Beijing Declaration on Digital Earth’ 2009 was fully adopted at the conference, loud in praise of the worldwide accomplishments attained in Digital Earth. The Declaration said that development of human society is confronted with drastic challenges from lack of resources, shortage of energies, environmental deterioration, frequent disasters, population explosion and especially global change. In response to these challenges, Digital Earth, as a controlling height and global strategic goal of contemporary technical development, shall integrate and further enhance the earth observation technology, geographic information system, GPS, network communication technology, virtual reality technology, grid computing technology and Earth information science. The Declaration called on the strengthened capability to share Digital Earth information resources, the unity and synthesis of government sectors, scientific and educational circles and enterprises to narrow digital divide, reinforce information sharing and draw attention from human society to development and future of Digital Earth.>>>