This 4th bi-annual Digital Earth Summit was held in Wellington, New Zealand from 2 to 4 September, which is one of the series of summit organized by the International Society for Digital Earth (ISDE) in 2012. The summit with theme “Digital Earth and Technology” was co-hosted by Wellington City Council and Land Information New Zealand. The three work streams in terms of the Digital environment, Resilient cities and Growing up digital have been carried out. There are 15 keynote speeches and 75 presentations, attracting around 200 delegates from more than 20 countries.

A Maori welcome party started the opening ceremony. The executive committee member of the ISDE received a Maori traditional reception. ISDE president Prof. John Richards and Mayor of Wellington City Ms. Celia Wade-Brown gave their summit opening remarks. In the Mayor’s speech Digital Earth technologies are expected to facilitate Wellington to build a creative digital capital.

“Platial Technology such as place-base GIS rather than co-ordinate-GIS will be one of the key Digital Earth drivers.” keynote speech by Dr. Peter Woodgate, Executive Committee member of the ISDE and CEO of the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information, Australia. John Richards gave a presentation entitled “Knowledge propagation in the Digital Earth Framework”, which illustrated the Digital Earth framework of transforming and developing knowledge theoretically and technically. “Digital Earth can take advantages of its fast developing technologies to participant in the Future Earth, a 10-year international research initiative of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and other international organizations”. Said by Prof. Guo Huadong, Secretariat General of the ISDE in his keynote speech of “Digital Earth for Future Earth”. In the afternoon panel sessions of the 3 days, hot discussions were made on Digital environment, Resilient cities and Growing up digital, with youth engagement to present their views on digital earth technologies and their future development. At the closing ceremony, Prof. Guo Huadong made remarks for the success of Digital Earth summit in Wellington, and handed over the flag of Digital Earth Summit to next hosting country, Japan.