Virtual Globes
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Virtual Globes
A virtual globe is a three-dimensional (3D) software model or representation of Earth or another world. A virtual globe provides the user with the ability to freely move around in the virtual environment by changing the viewing angle and position. Compared to a conventional globe, virtual globes have the additional capability of representing many different views of the surface of Earth. These views may be of geographical features, man-made features such as roads and buildings, or abstract representations of demographic quantities such as population. On November 20, 1997, Microsoft released an offline virtual globe in the form of Encarta Virtual Globe 98, followed by Cosmi's 3D World Atlas in 1999. The first widely publicized online virtual globes were NASA WorldWind (released in mid-2004) and Google Earth (mid-2005). Types Virtual globes may be used for study or navigation (by connecting to a GPS device) and their design varies considerably according to their purpose. Those ...
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Worldwind
NASA WorldWind is an open-source software, open-source (released under the NASA Open Source Agreement, NOSA license and the Apache 2.0 license) virtual globe. According to the website, "WorldWind is an open source virtual globe API. WorldWind allows developers to quickly and easily create interactive visualizations of 3D globe, map and geographical information. Organizations around the world use WorldWind to monitor weather patterns, visualize cities and terrain, track vehicle movement, analyze geospatial data and educate humanity about the Earth." It was first developed by NASA in 2003 for use on personal computers and then further developed in concert with the free software movement, open source community since 2004. a web-based version of WorldWind is available online. An Android (operating system), Android version is also available. The original version relied on .NET Framework, which ran only on Microsoft Windows. The more recent Java (programming language), Java ...
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ArcGIS Server
ArcGIS Server is the core server geographic information system (GIS) software made by Esri. ArcGIS Server is used for creating and managing GIS Web services, applications, and data. ArcGIS Server is typically deployed on-premises within the organization’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) or off-premises in a cloud computing environment. Background ArcGIS Server services supply mapping and GIS capabilities via ArcGIS Online for Esri Web and client applications, such as ArcGIS Desktop, ArcLogistics, the ArcGIS.com Viewer, ArcGIS Explorer, ArcGIS Explorer Online, ArcGIS Viewer for Flex, ArcGIS Mapping for SharePoint, Esri Business Analyst Online (BAO), and applications built with ArcGIS for iOS (Apple), iOS or BAO for iOS. Numerous third-party applications are licensed to use ArcGIS Server services, as well. ArcGIS Server extensions allow GIS functionality available within a subset of ArcGIS Desktop extensions to be deployed as Web Services. ArcGIS ...
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EarthBrowser
EarthBrowser was a virtual globe software developed by Lunar software. It was available online as a Flash application or could be installed locally as an AIR application. It focused mainly on visualising geophysical information such as weather, earthquakes, clouds, weather conditions, etc. It showed the earth as satellite images. EarthBrowser was originally developed in 1996 by Matt Giger, a University of Oregon graduate student, under the name Planet Earth. It was one of the first applications to show real-time patterns (including weather, earthquakes, and volcanic activity) on a virtual globe. It was largely superseded by the introduction of Keyhole Markup Language Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Key ..., used by most current virtual globe software. References Vir ...
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Free Software
Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price; all users are legally free to do what they want with their copies of a free software (including profiting from them) regardless of how much is paid to obtain the program.Selling Free Software
(GNU)
Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices. The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code—the preferred ...
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Osnabrück
Osnabrück (; ; archaic English: ''Osnaburg'') is a city in Lower Saxony in western Germany. It is situated on the river Hase in a valley penned between the Wiehen Hills and the northern tip of the Teutoburg Forest. With a population of 168,145 Osnabrück is the fourth largest city in Lower Saxony. More recently Osnabrück has become well known for its industry. Numerous companies in the automobile, paper, steel and grocery sectors are located in the city and its surrounding area. In spite of the massive destruction inflicted on the city during World War II, the Altstadt (old town) was eventually reconstructed extensively with designs loyal to the original medieval architecture there. Osnabrück was also the home of the largest British garrison outside the United Kingdom. Osnabrück's modern, urban image is enhanced by the presence of more than 22,000 students studying at the University and the University of Applied Sciences. Although part of the state of Lower Saxony, his ...
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Central Intelligence Agency
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA; ) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with advancing national security through collecting and analyzing intelligence from around the world and conducting covert operations. The agency is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia, and is sometimes metonymously called "Langley". A major member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA has reported to the director of national intelligence since 2004, and is focused on providing intelligence for the president and the Cabinet. The CIA is headed by a director and is divided into various directorates, including a Directorate of Analysis and Directorate of Operations. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA has no law enforcement function and focuses on intelligence gathering overseas, with only limited domestic intelligence collection. The CIA is responsibl ...
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United States Geological Survey
The United States Geological Survey (USGS), founded as the Geological Survey, is an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior whose work spans the disciplines of biology, geography, geology, and hydrology. The agency was founded on March 3, 1879, to study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, and the natural hazards that threaten it. The agency also makes maps of planets and moons, based on data from U.S. space probes. The sole scientific agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, USGS is a fact-finding research organization with no regulatory responsibility. It is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, with major offices near Lakewood, Colorado; at the Denver Federal Center; and in NASA Research Park in California. In 2009, it employed about 8,670 people. The current motto of the USGS, in use since August 1997, is "science for a changing world". The agency's previous slogan, adopted on its hundredth anniversary, was "Earth Science in the Pub ...
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Earth3D
Earth3D was developed as part of a diploma thesis of Dominique Andre Gunia at Braunschweig University of Technology to display a virtual globe of the earth. It was developed before Google bought Keyhole, Inc and changed their product into Google Earth. Earth3D downloads its data (satellite imagery and height data) from a server while the user navigates around. The data itself is saved in a Quadtree. It uses data from NASA, USGS, the CIA and the city of Osnabrück. One of the strengths of Earth3D is the capacity of showing meteorological phenomena, like Low-pressure areas, anticyclones, etc. in near-real time.http://www.cuadernalia.net/spip.php?article4255 Earth3D (Visor interactivo 2D, 2.5D y 3D para Andalucía) The original version of Earth3D was developed using Trolltech's QT framework. Later a version built with Java and JOGL was developed.http://www.earth3d.org/ Welcome to Earth3D But the demand for a Java-based version was very little. This may be because NASA's WorldWin ...
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Bhuvan
Bhuvan (lit: Earth) is an Indian web-based utility which allows users to explore a set of geographic content prepared by the Indian Space Research Organisation. The content which the utility serves is mostly restricted to within Indian boundaries and is offered in four regional languages. The content includes thematic maps related to disasters, agriculture, water resources, land cover, and processed satellite data generated by ISRO. Bhuvan is known for its association with various sections of the Government of India to enable the use of geospatial technology. Since its inception, Bhuvan has enabled the Indian government to host public geospatial data as information layers for visualisation and public consumption. Examples of the types of geospatial layers include the Toll Information System for the National Highways Authority of India, the Islands information System for MHA, cultural heritage sites for the Ministry of Culture, etc. The information for the platform is obtained f ...
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Bing Maps
Bing Maps (previously Live Search Maps, Windows Live Maps, Windows Live Local, and MSN Virtual Earth) is a web mapping service provided as a part of Microsoft's Bing suite of search engines and powered by the Bing Maps Platform framework which also supporBing Maps for EnterpriseAPIs anAzure MapsAPIs. Since 2020, the map data is provided by TomTom, OpenStreetMap and others. History Bing Maps was originally launched as MSN Virtual Earth, which was released for beta testing on July 24, 2005. It was a continuation of previous Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft MapPoint and TerraServer. Its original stand out feature was the aerial imagery. The original version lacked many of its distinguishing features, including birds' eye view and 3D maps, and the Collections functionality was limited to a single "Scratchpad" of points of interest. In December 2005, Virtual Earth was replaced by Windows Live Local, featuring improvements, technologies from Pictometry International, and in ...
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Shapefile
The shapefile format is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. It is developed and regulated by Esri as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products. The shapefile format can spatially describe vector features: points, lines, and polygons, representing, for example, water wells, rivers, and lakes. Each item usually has attributes that describe it, such as ''name'' or ''temperature''. Overview The shapefile format is a digital vector storage format for storing geographic location and associated attribute information. This format lacks the capacity to store topological information. The shapefile format was introduced with ArcView GIS version 2 in the early 1990s. It is now possible to read and write geographical datasets using the shapefile format with a wide variety of software. The shapefile format stores the geometry as primitive geometric shapes like points, lines, and poly ...
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Keyhole Markup Language
Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Keyhole Earth Viewer. It was created by Keyhole, Inc, which was acquired by Google in 2004. KML became an international standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium in 2008. Google Earth was the first program able to view and graphically edit KML files, but KML support is now available in many GIS software applications, such as Marble, QGIS, and ArcGIS. Structure The KML file specifies a set of features (place marks, images, polygons, 3D models, textual descriptions, etc.) that can be displayed on maps in geospatial software implementing the KML encoding. Every place has a longitude and a latitude. Other data can make a view more specific, such as tilt, heading, or altitude, which together define a "camera view" along with a timestamp or t ...
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