“…A DGGS can be thought of as a discrete, multiresolution, digital framework for referencing geospatial information to the earth. For the last two decades, DGGSs have played an important role in Digital Earth research (Adams, 2017;Amiri, Bhojani, & Samavati, 2013;Amiri, Samavati, & Peterson, 2015;Goodchild, 2000;Lin, Zhou, Xu, Zhu, & Lu, 2018;Sherlock, 2017;Vince & Zheng, 2009) but they are now gaining attention in the big data community and have recently been suggested as a solution to IoT (Internet of Things) data integration (Purss et al, 2017), big spatial vector data management (Yao & Li, 2018), and as the de facto global reference system for geospatial big data (OGC, 2017a). In addition, they have recently been utilized in the design of a scalable crowdsensing platform for geospatial data (Birk, 2018), and in the study of massive point cloud handling (Sirdeshmukh, 2018).…”