OpenWebGlobe was a project and technology for processing and interactively visualizing vast volumes of geospatial data in a 3D

virtual globe 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 positio ...

, even the forks on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...

are rather dea

The OpenWebGlobe

can have several data categories like image data, elevation data,

points of interest A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Eiffel Tower, or a point on Mars representing the location of its highest m ...

, vector data, and 3D objects. Before streaming such massive and complex data over the internet, this data must be pre-processed. Such pre-processing usually comprises a transformation from a local to a global reference system, creation of pyramid layers or levels of detail (LOD), tiling of the data, and optionally compression and encryption. Recently, these algorithms were ported to high performance compute cluster using

OpenMP OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) is an application programming interface (API) that supports multi-platform shared-memory multiprocessing programming in C, C++, and Fortran, on many platforms, instruction-set architectures and operating sy ...

and MPI and are also released as

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. Because data sets are usually large, containing several terabytes, advanced

out-of-core In computing, external memory algorithms or out-of-core algorithms are algorithms that are designed to process data that are too large to fit into a computer's main memory at once. Such algorithms must be optimized to efficiently fetch and access da ...

rendering mechanisms with a level of detail approach are used for visualization. OpenWebGlobe is an

project. It is written in

WebGL WebGL (Short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-ins. WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerate ...

. The lead developer is the Institute of Geomatics Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland ''(german:

Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz A ''Fachhochschule'' (; plural ''Fachhochschulen''), abbreviated FH, is a university of applied sciences (UAS), in other words a German tertiary education institution that provides professional education in many applied sciences and applied ar ...

)''.

Developing Globe Applications

The OpenWebGlobe SDK is also a

3D engine A game engine is a software framework primarily designed for the development of video games and generally includes relevant libraries and support programs. The "engine" terminology is similar to the term "software engine" used in the software in ...

on top of

. With the OpenWebGlobe SDK it is possible to create custom

applications. This JavaScript "Hello World" example creates a virtual globe and adds an image and elevation layer: function main()

Demos

Switzerland 3D

The demo version of a potential 3D Viewer for geo.admin.ch - the geo-portal of the Swiss Confederation - was online on the OpenWebGlobe's website until July 31, 2012.News from February 9th, 2012 from the geoportal of the Swiss Confederation, http://www.geo.admin.ch/internet/geoportal/en/home/current/news20120209.html The scene covered the entire Switzerland and was based on high resolution data from swisstopo (SWISSIMAGE).

Source code

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.openwebglobe.com/
Demo: Switzerland 3D
Cross-platform free software Geomatics engineering JavaScript Virtual globes WebGL