DIGITAL EARTH: THE GEOSPATIAL REVOLUTION AND ITS WORLDVIEW IMPLICATIONS

The paper considers the so-called "Digital Earth" - a new concept of the organization of geospatial information, formulated and implemented in practice at the turn of the 20th-21th centuries. The history of the creation of the Digital Earth is discussed, the main features that distinguish it from previously known geographical instruments, such as scale independency and projection independency, are analyzed. A typology of geovisualization methods that unveiled the evolution of geospatial method, is proposed, including maps, atlases, globes and Digital Earth. The factors that made it possible to provide the Digital Earth with its new functionality are discussed. The main one was the widespread use of images to form a geospatial context, unlike classical geovisualizations, in which the geocontext was set using cartographic signs. This feature allows you to raise and discuss the issue of the semiotics of geocontext. It is concluded that the semiotic features of the Digital Earth can be interpreted as paradoxical. Their analysis allows us to hypothesize the possibility of the existence of a carrier of metrically accurate and reliable information about the geospatial context other than signs, and that such a carrier can be considered a "zero sign" in semiotics by analogy with the zero sign in a particular sign system - mathematics. As part of this approach, the Digital Earth appears to be a heterogeneous information system using non-signs, mosaics of remote sensing data, to form a geocentric framework and allowing it to include any other geospatial products as elements. The possibilities of the Digital Earth as a new management paradigm are briefly discussed.