Google Earth™ is Google’s satellite imagery-based mapping product that combines global coverage of imagery with new navigational features including integrated Google search capabilities. It is based on technology from Keyhole, a company acquired by Google in October 2004. Google Earth is a broadband mapping tool that enables users to fly from space to street level views to find geographic information, and to explore places around the world.
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Google Earth is a popular and widely used geographical browser. It is a standalone application that enables spatial data from a variety of sources to be displayed, explored and visually compared. Google Earth has the following important characteristics:
• Free
• Easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. Data are displayed on an interactive globe that can be rotated and zoomed to visually explore data in different regions of the world and at different spatial resolutions.
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Google Earth, a tool that combines satellite imagery, maps, terrain, and 3D buildings, has partnered with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) to bring forth tangible proof of the devastation that is taking place in Darfur. It is a particularly good advocacy tool because it gives a clear visual representation of what is taking place in Darfur. Use this guide for tips on how to use Google Earth to move Darfur as a significant issue on your campus.
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Google Earth is a virtual globe program, allowing viewers to visualize data on top of displayed satellite images of the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2005 and released to the public in 2006, Google Earth fast became a household name hailed as a revolution for humanitarian development, much as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were several decades ago. According to MapAction, “There seem at present tobe two distinct groups of humanitarian practitioners: those who are already, albeit tentatively,exploiting Google Earth and related geospatial methods in their work,and those whowill be, as soon as they see their first demonstration of its potential.” (MapAction, 2008: 9)
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Google Earth is a free-of-charge, downloadable program that allows you to view the entire Earth from orbit with amazing clarity. It maps the entire earth as a 3d Globe by pasting together images obtained from satellite imagery and aerial photography. The Google Earth Program comes as part of Google’s free “Software Pack”. It’s a quick and easy download that you can get for free. It comes with these great free titles:
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Sensors are everywhere, which includes space, air and ground. Earth phenomena such as disasters also occur everywhere; such as wildfires, floods and volcanoes. There is a need to rapidly deploy existing sensors to aid emergency workers and investigators. The vision for our effort is to provide users the capability to create “mash ups” (a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience), similar to that used by Google Earth users to create a composite map with overlays of sensor information and from other data sources such as weather, traffic, urban construction etc. We make use of Web 2.0 technology and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) web service standards to enable access to Earth’s sensors is an emerging mega-trend which will lower the cost of producing customized science by an order of magnitude. This paper will outline the key aspects of our experiments to date and implications for the future and in particular the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) international effort.
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In most scientific disciplines, the majority of academic papers are written collaboratively. They also tend to undergo several rounds of revision, with new content often being added after peer review and style and format reworked for target journals. Currently, this tends to involve emailing versions of the document between authors, or storing versions on shared drives. However, a new breed of online applications that mimic the functions of desktop applications could change the process of producing a scientific paper.
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Modern Geographical Information Systems (GIS) [1] provide a service-oriented architecture for interacting with geographical data sets and related maps. Web-based GIS systems are architected around the same principles as more general Web service systems based on SOAP [2], WSDL [3], and REST. Mirroring the World Wide Web Consortium and OASIS Web service standards-making bodies, the Open Geospatial Consortium [5] defines open standards for messages, XML data formats, and access protocols that are specific to the GIS community. In addition to OGC-based services, there are many companies (such as ESRI and AutoDesk) that provide proprietary, commercial solutions. Services from these various providers are not normally interoperable.
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