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Earth
Science, Logistics, and Outreach Terrainbases |
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1st Annual Virtual Globes
Scientific Users Conference
10-12 July 2006 Boulder, Colorado Conference Summary Purpose and Overview The intended goal of this conference was to assess the state-of-the-art in the use of online Virtual Globes (VGs) in support of earth sciences, because VGs are quickly becoming the new paradigm in earth science, earth science education and outreach, earth science logistics, and earth science data access. This conference addressed questions such as: How are these tools currently being used in earth sciences? How do they work? How have they changed earth sciences? What needs of earth sciences are currently not being met by the existing tools? What should we expect for the future and what role should we play in it. As hoped, this conference brought together earth scientists, educators, and related individuals who are currently using or planning to use VGs to support their work, with the intent of facilitating the formation of a community that can serve as a nucleus for support, discussion, promotion, and enhancement of use of VGs in the earth sciences. This page describes the meeting, provides links to the presentations, and gives an overview of many of the discussions. Participants About 70 people attended the conference over its three days (after the first day, we didn’t keep track…). The group worked out to be an excellent mix of tool developers, programmers, technicians, scientists, consultants, data archival experts, educators and the public. Thus, our many discussions during the conference were able to range over many topics with great breadth and depth, without getting too bogged down in any one area of interest. The list of registered participants can be found here (note some of these folks did not attend and others showed up without registering).
Presentations A total of 25 official presentations were made at the conference. The titles and abstracts for these presentations can be found at http://www.earthslot.org/vgconference/agenda.php, where you can also find PowerPoint presentations and related hyperlinks for many of them. The conference was kicked off by Tim Foresman, who gave us an excellent introduction into the history of the Digital Earth movement and how Virtual Globes fit into that, as well as an invitation to the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth (www.isde5.org) to be held in San Francisco next June. Day One focused on providing an overview of many of the VG tools currently available. We heard about tools developed by Google, NASA, GeoFusion, ESRI, Microsoft, and Skyline Software. Despite the presentation-packed day, there seemed to be ample time for questions and discussions. The day ended with a reception hosted at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, where about half the crowd mingled for several hours to get to know each other and discuss the days’ talks.
Day Two focused on user presentations. We heard from quite a range of users, covering nearly all of the VG tools presented on Day One. Topics ranged from formal earth science education, to informal education, to scientific uses, to natural hazard response, to biological epidemic tracking, to data archive retrievals, to long-term archival of VG applications. We had a 2 hour lunch designed to allow for impromptu presentations, during which at which at least three large groups self-organized, covering tutorials on GE data ingestion, the upcoming RapidEye satellite launches, and a WMS tutorial. The day ended with a panel discussion which lasted about 2 hours, covering a wide variety of topics, many of which are listed in the next section.
Day Three focused on tutorials and further demonstrations of the VG tools presented on day one. Here we got first hand demonstrations on how to ingest data, manipulate and edit it, and publish it to the web. The presentations largely took the form of directed discussions, with substantial group input taking place. We ended with a final wrap-up discussion on how we should keep the momentum of this meeting going, and many of those ideas are repeated in the last section of this note. Discussions Our discussions over three days of the current state of Virtual Globes and their future ranged over a number of issues. Few of the discussions actually resulted in a true conclusion, so hopefully most will continue on through other mechanisms until our 2nd annual meeting, where further resolution might result. - What just happened? Various VGs have been around for 5 years or so, but it was not until the launch of Google Earth that they struck a nerve with the public. How did they do it? In some sense it doesn’t matter. What matters is that it did, and now millions of people who previous could not spell GIS are using it every day. For better or worse, GE is now the "industry" leader in VGs and the tool that all others must be compared to, whether appropriate or not. While all of the power of these tools has been around for a long time now, their combination into a single, easy-to-use, and often free package has resulted in something distinct and new. - GE vs the world. An open question is whether the other VG tools, many of which have substantially greater GIS and visualization power, can find a niche or compete against GE. General consensus seemed to be that, just like with most everything else, there will never be one tool that can do it all and which VG tool to use should be a function of what story you are trying to tell with it. Various tool developers all mentioned their desire to work with each other rather than against each other, and I found this quite encouraging. I left the meeting believing that there was ample room for multiple tools and that the competition would only benefit science. But in the short term, my impression is that GE will continue to dominate the public's interest and that this cannot be ignored for purposes of public outreach and education of science, but further that it is our responsibility as scientists to continue educate the public on what other tools have to offer and make them more savvy VG and GIS users. - Just what is a GIS, anyway? Is Google Earth a GIS? It can't do principal component analysis, histogram stretching, or network modeling on its own, but does that matter? VGs perform the basic functions of GIS, relating various types of information (whether raster, vector, movies, sound, etc) in a geospatial context. That sounds like GIS, but opinions varied on the categorization. - 2D vs 3D. In our panel discussion, the question of whether "2D is dead" came up. General consensus was that it is not dead, and never will be. 2D and 3D tools serve different purposes and each has its place and always will. In terms of public appeal, it is clear that online 3D GIS is what the general public wants and understands. - Data formats and sharing. This issue came up repeatedly. It would seem that KML is becoming the default standard, and despite its shortcomings is quite powerful and useful, at least in the sense that its best to have some standard rather than none at all. VGs also use raster files in a pyramid layer format, and there are several formats for this that are in common usage and seem to work well. What seems unresolved is how the owner of a large raster data set should store his data online so that various VGs can access it, particularly with DEMs. The WMS standard seems to fill this niche for now, but has issues. Various standards boards are apparently now considering what to do about this. - Naming conventions. What do we call a KML file other than a KML file? Especially if it is not a KML file, but a similar file type designed for another VG tool? Applications, mashups, etc are useful generic terms, but something more specific to VGs would be handy. VG apps, VGX files, ...? Similarly, what to call the VG tools and VG earth models? And what about the name "Virtual Globes" itself -- is that what we should call these things? General consensus was that Virtual Globes was a good name for the general class of tools. - VG archival and longevity. The issue of how our hard work will be preserved for the future also came up several times. The issue is what happens if a tool like Google Earth disappears? How does one archive a VGX for the long term, knowing that, for example, the GE tool works online only and is constantly changing with no guarantees of backwards compatibility? One promising idea was to create MPG movies using the applications, which do stand a chance of long term survival, but this of course eliminates all of the interactive power of the tools and the applications created with them. - Academic credit. A big issue among University types is how to get credit for the hard work put into making VGX files, as our administrators for better or worse see peer-reviewed journal publications as the only worthwhile faculty output product. Unless this issue finds resolution, it will be difficult to get large-scale academic buy-in to creating and 'publishing' these files. - Earth Science input into VG tool features.
Most of the tool developers are out to make money, so how
can we earth scientists help drive the features of these tools when
the big money is in advertising revenue? Next Steps We discussed a number of possibilities for output products for the conference. Here is what is going on, with a call for help to implement each of them. Please contact me directly to get involved. - Turning this note into an article for general consumption. Imaging Notes was mentioned as a possibility, but other ideas are welcome. - Re-creation of EarthSLOT’s Fly Now page into something more official, functional, and easy to update. The general idea I have here is to reformat it based on online-buying technology, such that a user can search by VG tool, science theme, date, etc, and get returned a list of VGX files. They could then launch them, and provide reviews. The files would be entered by a list of trusted users or moderators, who would provide a few screenshots, their impressions and rating, etc. Email discussions are now ongoing between Peter Prokein, Steve Aulenbach, Philip Goldstein, and myself on ways to implement this on no budget, but everyone is welcomed to join in, just let me know. - Publication of a paper book on Virtual Globes. What I have in mind is a guide to help users figure out how best to tell their story using virtual globes, with examples online or disk. It might include an overview of how VGs work in general (eg., server vs client side, data formats), with additional chapters devoted to each of the VG tools, how they work, how to get started with them, and what they have to offer. We might start this process out by doing it all online, then find a publisher. - P2P networking. I’ve started a Yahoo Groups forum called VirtualGlobes http://groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualglobes/ This might not be the best solution in the long term, but in the short term I will invite everyone at the meeting to join and tell their friends about it. It has options to limit traffic to once per day or per week, if its starts picking up. In the long term, hopefully our new web site can host a more traditional forum. - New VG web site. I’ve purchased several new domain names and will decide shortly which to focus on. The EarthSLOT site receives about 100,000 hits per month, but it perhaps doesn’t fully capture the Virtual Globe genre due to its history as being a VG tool site. I’ll let you know when we launch it. - ISDE5. At the meeting, we decided that the 2nd Annual Virtual Globes Scientific Users Conference would occur at the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth (www.isde5.org), to be held in San Francisco next June. ISDE has occurred every 2 years for the past decade, always overseas until now. So this is the first one in the US and the first one since VGs have really become popular. We plan a VG session that will overview the various tools (like Day One of our meeting) and a distributed session that will occur within the various topical themes throughout the meeting (like Natural Hazards, International Polar Year, Education, etc). Help is needed here for organizing the symposium and its sessions, as well as contributions. - ISDE, the journal. Tim Foresman announced the creation of a new peer-reviewed journal focusing on Digital Earth and virtual globes. The first issue will pull papers from the ISDE conference, which will be due in December. - Sessions at Fall AGU. Two special sessions dedicated to Virtual Globe technologies are planned for the fall American Geophysical Union meeting in December in San Francisco this year – one in Informatics (IN21) and one in the Education (ED21) section. These are great opportunities to present your work and continue networking. The education session is planned to have an International Polar Year focus. As discussed with the conveners of ED12, if you are considering to submit a presentation on education issues in IPY which make use of virtual globes, then the virtual globe education session (ED21) is the best choice since we will have an infrastructure in place specifically for this, as described below. All presentations in the Informatics section will be given in using a novel form of poster presentation. These will take place in the poster display area, but AGU has agreed to set up a special area for our session, where presenters will be able to post a full-sized poster AND use a video projector to display their work on an adjacent 3’x4’ space. High-speed internet and video projectors will be provided. The Educational session is expected to be a mixture of standard length talks and poster demonstrations in this same special poster venue. Note that we are not yet guaranteed an oral session and that AGU’s conference guidelines allow for two first-author presentations as standard non-invited submissions if one is within an educational session.Here are links to them: Thanks to all of you for making this such a successful meeting -- I hope to see you at AGU or ISDE5!
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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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