Introduction

This chapter depicts the background and concepts of a platform designed to evaluate global systems. Sustainability is a crucial concern within our socioeconomic-environmental systems and is formalized as multi-dimensional optimization problems containing several key performance indicators. Big data has enabled us to analyze and improve our world from a holistic point of view. Moreover, geospatial big data enhances the understanding of sustainability from regional aspects. However, they have several challenges from data and computation points of view. The utilization of Grid Square statistics can contribute to addressing critical issues to evaluate the sustainability of our world by enabling us to share and compute data and statistics in a reasonable way based on their ability on discretization or digitalization. Furthermore, this chapter addresses the purpose and motivation of this book and its structure.