The 4th International Polar Year
Google Earth Layer
BETA
To facilitate awareness and understanding between
scientists, politicians, educators, the media and the public,
we have created an International
Polar Year layer for Google Earth which you can download here.
Our goal for this layer
is that it will evolve continually throughout the International
Polar Year, through contributions of IPY scientists. Currently,
we consider it still in Beta form because the design team is still
developing guidelines for contributions by the scientific community
and this layer has not yet been tested extenstively (as of 01 Mar
07). To make the best layer possible, we need input from the community,
both in terms of feedback and contributions.
Presently, the layer
has four folders:
"Take a Tour of IPY" This folder is set up as
a guided Tour of IPY, intended to bring people up to speed on what
IPY is all about, including its history and some information about
the polar regions. Simply double-click on the folder and press the
Play button; we'll be developing a user-tutorial soon on how to
play Tours and optimize their display. Many of the photos shown
in this Tour came from existing on-line publications on the Arctic
and Antarctic; in these cases, the picture is hyperlinked to that
source where full credits can be found.
"Take a Tour of IPY Projects" This folder
is set up as a guided Tour of all 240 endorsed projects taking place
during this IPY. This tour was created by pulling information directly
out of the IPY project database, plus some project summaries developed
afterwards. Each project is displayed at a single location, typically
the first site listed in their proposal. This may not be the most
representative site for that project and some projects are likely
in erroneous locations. Considering that none of the coordinates
were in machine readable form and many projects did not even give
coordinates in their proposal, such that the geocoding had to all
be done manually, it's not too bad for a first pass. At some point
in the future (that is, if we get some funding...) we may solicit
the projects to provide us with a replacement popup for their project
that includes a photo, more concise text, hyperlinks to their web
page, and a better geolocation.
"Learn more about an IPY Project" This
folder is designed to allow individual scientists to describe their
project in greater detail. Here is the opportunity for individual
projects to strut their stuff. We will be developing some style
templates and basic guidelines for contributions, but the basic
idea is that all of the content seen here will be developed by the
community and our role will just be providing some basic formatting
and ingestion help. Look for this guidance by the end of March.
Lisa Ballagh and Ross Swick have developed a basic How
to create KML guide and a KML
Template to assist with this.
"Useful Polar Layers" This is a collection
of useful background data that is not related to a particular IPY
project. It is a network link which you can refresh often to get
the latest update. We will also develop some basic style guidelines
for this, but the general idea is that this will be quite minimal
so that no re-coding of existing kml will need to occur. Essentially
we just want to make sure that sufficient context exists so that
users will know what this data is all about, why its interesting,
how to use it, etc, and this can be done with a simple hyperlink
to a web page.
A couple of requests for volunteers:
- If you find something factually wrong within the popups of the
"Take a Tour of IPY" folder, please let me
know.
- If someone would like to create a "How to use the Tour feature
of Google Earth" including screen shots of menu choices, I'd
love to post it here and credit you.
- We only roughly geolocated projects in the Antarctic and Bipolar
folders. If someone would like to take the time to better geolocate
and snapshot viewpoints these, I would greatly appreciate it and
would be happy to credit you. At this point (that is, without any
funding...) I cannot accommodate individual request to move your
project's viewpoint to a better location or more pleasing view --
so either take on improving the whole folder or be happy for now.
Feel free to let me know if you want to do this, so I can tell you
if anyone has already volunteered and perhaps you can split up the
work (about a day's effort by the time its all pretty).
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.
No warranty: Data is provided "as is," without any warranty
whatsoever, including but not limited to any warranty as to performance,
merchantability, or fitness for any particular purpose.
Liability: The entire risk as to the results
of the use of this data is assumed by the user. EarthSLOT is not
responsible for any interpretation or conclusions made by those
who acquire or use it. EarthSLOT shall not be liable for any direct,
indirect, special, incidental, compensatory or consequential damages
or third-party claims resulting from the use of this data, even
if EarthSLOT has been advised of the possibility of such potential
loss or damage. In states that do not allow the exclusion or limitation
of incidental or consequential damages, this data may not be used.
(c) 2004 Matt Nolan. Please contact
us with questions, comments, or compliments.
