EarthSLOT Mission, Philosophy,
Motivation, and Background

Our mission at EarthSLOT is to advance earth science and earth science education through the use of Virtual Globes -- on-line 3D terrain visualization and GIS tools.

The original philosophy behind EarthSLOT was to serve an easy-to-use 3D GIS environment where end-users can freely explore our planet and earth scientists can inexpensively add new data on their own, such that we can more easily share our knowledge of the planet. This was before tools like Google Earth and World Wind were available. Thus we created such an environment using the tools of Skyline Software, with the plan being to centralize the difficult and expensive tasks (like merging topography and imagery and serving this on-line) and to decentralize the easy and fun tasks (like adding vector data that describes a field site, airplanes/boats/cars that describe how to get there, links to actual data, etc). In this way, we hoped that EarthSLOT would grow from the ground up, with the most motivated users adding their most interesting content on their own, using their own existing funding and resources with no need for new funding to recreate what is already available.

Our theory was confirmed in a big way, albeit by Google Earth, that if we build it they will come it will revolutionize earth science.

Thus EarthSLOT's role now has evolved into helping the scientific community become more aware of the power of these tools, rather than just being tool-sponsors ourselves. So, though you can still access our virtual globe (which is still more powerful than many of the others in many ways), my main focus now is to bring people together at workshops and conferences to help push the overall field of Virtual Globes into realizing its full potential. You can learn more about these efforts here.