Since the Digital Earth been advanced by Al Gore—the vice presidentof USAon Jan.31 1998

the scien tists

entrepreneurs and politicians of many countries have responsed activelytoit

they allproposed a digitalearth from their own pointofview

butallofthem didn’tgive a system and overallvision .Based onthe developmentofgeographic information processing and information technology and the requirement of information society

a system and relatively overall description ofdigitalearth is given inthis paper

the research contents

keytechnologies and application prospect are covered .In this way

a relatively objective description of digitalearth is given .