The new vision pointed out what Digital Earth might be in the future and will lead new development of the Digital Earth concept, research and applications. ISDE president, professor John Richards explained, “The Digital Earth Vision 2020 will act as the geographical framework on which to build solutions to physical, social and cultural problems, with functionalities of satisfactory metric accuracy, inclusion of underground and underwater data, historical and time predictive models, data archiving, dynamic and interactive, improved access to current and historical data and information, incorporation of inherently non-visual data, metadata on quality, trust and uncertainty, participative in data provision, analysis and debate, includes information on place, culture, identity and networks, development is driven by application demand, and easy and fun to use.”