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Earth
Science, Logistics, and Outreach Terrainbases |
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Contract Work Though our goal is to make getting into the exciting world of 3D GIS as easy as possible, we realize that not everyone has the time or inclination to create the applications they would like to see. Also, the process of adding new imagery or elevation data to an earth model can be fairly complex and expensive, much more so that adding a label showing the location of your weather station. While we would like to just take your data and create these applications for you, the practical reality is that we have expenses that must be covered for such work. This page therefore describes some of the ways that we can collaborate on new projects and is mostly an overview of the technology so that you can assess for yourself at which stage you may want our help. Note: if you have already created new earth models or applications, we are happy to post those for free. We believe that 3D GIS tools like found on EarthSLOT will only be useful if they are easy enough to use that people will actually use them. We believe that the applications found here are not only that easy, but their video-game look-and-feel is so compelling that we will keep drawing users back to the site. For example, though our projects thus far tend to have an Arctic focus (because we live there), we include high resolution data from the rest of the world and many major cities so that people can put this system into the context of their own daily lives. But once those users are at our site, they are in a position where learning about your research efforts can happen easily and effectively. Therefore, by getting involved with EarthSLOT, you can greatly leverage our resources for your benefit, and thus hopefully also for the benefit of our planet and the research going on here. We believe that the greatest threat to the health of our planet is misinformation about it -- please help spread the truth and eliminate this trend, whether through EarthSLOT or not. At the moment, our greatest expertise is in using Skyline Software's 3D engine and tools, but as we gain more familiarity with other engines, we will begin incorporating them as needed.
Here is a simple overview of our basic strategy : 1) We can do the hard and expensive work by creating the earth models (called MPT or TBP files in Skyline Software's engine) through contributions of elevation or imagery data from you and serve them on-line from our site. Test examples we can likely do for free, but involved work will require a contract. 2) Either you or we can do the easy, fun and cheap work by creating applications describing your work that overlay on one of our terrainbases, and you can host these applications on our pages, on your pages, both, or just keep them for yourself, as you see fit. The Fly Now! page is filled with such applications. 3) These applications can be viewed either through one of the free viewers already in existence (TerraExplorer, Google Earth, etc), or we can create custom viewers with custom tools specific to your application. Here is an example. Users, funding agencies, and the planet benefit from our collective efforts. 4) The more benefits we accrue, the easier it will be to keep EarthSLOT funded and keep the process going.
Here is a more detailed version of that strategy: Our greatest expertise is with the Skyline Software suite of products. Both GoogleEarth and WorldWind have similar components (though sometimes with much different functionality), so we will just describe it for Skyline Software's products. TerraExplorer. This software is the free viewer that allows users to explore environments that are already created. You can download this software at the Fly Now! page. All of the engines found at EarthSLOT have a free viewer. TerraExplorer Pro. This software allows scientists, program managers, educators and other interested users to add their own data layers to the environment and create their own FLY files (the extension of the Skyline Software applications you find at the Fly Now! page). Typically these FLY files include data in the form of vector layers such as shapefiles, but point data, 2D or 3D objects, and other types of coverages are also supported. In addition, flight paths, animations, moving planes/boats/cars/submarines/etc, html and many other options are available to create environments that are content-rich and varied. Developers would purchase this software on their own and link their applications to our terrainbase. The current academic price is pretty cheap, but you would have to contact Skyline Software directly regarding purchase (they prefer to not list prices here). They offer free 30 day trials of nearly all of their products. We find their software very easy to use, and believe that you will find that in less than a day of effort that you will be able to create the most sophisticated FLY files found on EarthSLOT. Most of ours were created in an hour or less, many by first time users. GoogleEarth also a roughly equivalent version of TerraExplorer Pro, which can be purchased at their web site. TerraBuilder. This software is what merges the digital elevation data (the underlying 3D topography) with the imagery that is draped over it to create the terrainbases called MPT or TBP files. The EarthSLOT terrainbases are created by using this software. MPT files can be freely distributed and placed on your hard drive; they are typically smaller files for this reason. TBP files have to be served from a central location, as they can be many terrabytes in size. The retail price when we purchased TerraBuilder was close to my annual salary. Image overlays are also possible in GoogleEarth, though stand-alone earth models are not possible. TerraGate. This software is what allows EarthSLOT to be served over the internet. Only we have access to the EarthSLOT TerraGate. It comes with a rich set of password protection features so that we can limit or prevent abuses of the system. When we bought our license, the retail price for this service was close to several years of my annual salary. GoogleEarth also offers a similar service for a similar price. Essentially there is nothing we've done that you cannot do yourself, completely independently from us, because you can buy the same commercial software that we did, acquire, merge and serve the same publicly available data that we did, and create the same fly files that we did. But why bother?
1) If you have already created earth models or applications and would just like us to post them here, contact us and if it fits our mission we will likely be happy to host them for free. 2) If you have high-resolution DEMs or imagery that you are able to contribute freely to EarthSLOT, please contact us and we can discuss how to incorporate it here. Please note that we prefer to only accept imagery that is completely ortho-rectified, DEMs in regular rectangular matrices, and all in geographic coordinates using the WGS84 ellipsoid; otherwise we spend too much time fiddling with your data and not enough time improving EarthSLOT. 3) If you have several Arctic-related vector layers, shapefiles, or point coverages that you are able to freely contribute, please contact us and we can discuss how to incorporate it here. Generally speaking, we would rather you add the content yourselves (see below) since we're not really funded to do that, but for easy-to-ingest, interesting demonstration data sets that might lead to new funding we have usually been happy to make exceptions. 4) If you have many vector layers and would like to create a customized, robust environment that suits exactly your interests, then you would need to purchase TerraExplorer Pro. The educational price is reasonably priced, but you will need to contact Skyline Software directly about this. Here are three examples of developers in this category. A) A scientist wishes to display his or her terrain-related data (instrument locations, study plots, flight paths, ship tracks, etc) as an outreach effort. B) A group of scientists trying to coordinate their efforts by showing the spatial relationships between their data acquisitions or between their data and topography. C) A high school teacher wishes to develop a curriculum based on EarthSLOT and incorporate lesson tools directly in the application. In these examples, you would link your vector and annotative data to our underlying terrainbase that contains the merged DEMs and imagery. You could do this on-line with little interaction with us, or we can create a subset of the terrain data (an MPT file) that you can put on your own computer; as we are not currently funded to do this either, we would need to find a suitable arrangement in the meantime. But if development and maintenance of a new environment is not your thing, we are also happy to discuss contracting this work to us.
How would end-users access your data? There are two ways. First, you can create a link from your own home page that connects users directly to EarthSLOT with only your vector data displayed, without them ever seeing our EarthSLOT web page. This is equivalent to what you will find by following this link or to the links in the "Fly Now!" page, but with your vector data overlaid instead of ours. Second, you can send us your custom environment, and we will place it in our "Fly Now!" page. Of course you can also do both. Note that while we do not wish to be a bottleneck to the creativity of possible EarthSLOT developers or to expansion of the EarthSLOT user-base, as managers of the environment we maintain dictatorial control over its use and must also cover any of our own costs that are beyond the scope of our current federal funding. Therefore access to the underlying EarthSLOT terrainbase may become password protected for access by those wishing to add content, and you must contact us before your environment can link to ours successfully. In general we hope that most educational projects can be supported for free to contributors and end-users, but in it may become necessary to charge developers to support bandwidth, storage, or development costs on our end. |
Copyright notices: TerraExplorer, TerraExplorer Pro, TerraGate, TerraPhoto, and TerraBuilder are registered trademarks of Skyline Software Inc. GoogleEarth, GoogleEarth Plus, and GoogleEarth Pro are registered trademarks of Google. Note: This material is based
upon work supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed
in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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