According to the initial vision of "digital earth" (DE), the public should constitute a significant proportion of its users. However, to date, most of the studies and applications have focused on science, the private sector and government. A DE-supported online oceanic educational public service and popularization system, iOcean, is studied. First, the vision for the public's engagement with "digital ocean" is described: an analysis is presented from four aspects, i.e., the space dimension, the time dimension, the state dimension and its relationship with human beings. Second, the technical framework of iOcean is discussed, including data updating and model computing, the data, the function, and the application layers. Third, two key technologies are studied in detail that will enable the construction of iOcean. More than half a million public viewers have used the current version's website. Practical demonstrations show that iOcean can bring virtual oceans to web browsers and desktops and construct a bridge between government departments and the general public.
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