Cyber-applications as gateway to data-rich digital earth systems

The underlying vision of the Digital Earth (DE) calls for applications that can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data and allow users to study and analyse of our planet. Since the declaration of this vision in the late 90s, a significant number of DE data-sets have been created by the industry, governments, non-governmental organisations and individuals. An overwhelming majority of the successful applications that use DE data-sets has its end-user applications running on the desktop. While these applications are great tools, they remain inaccessible to the community as a whole. In this paper, we present a framework for the development of cyber-applications. We define an abstract architecture for cyber-applications based on the model-view-controller paradigm, which allows the dynamic inclusion of functional and data components into its execution engine at run-time. We define the operational characteristics of cyber-applications. We also specify the interface of pluggable components to the architecture. Finally, we demonstrate the appropriateness of the abstract architecture by means of a case study