Creating and Visualizing the Digital Earth

Principal Investigators:  Yvan G Leclerc , Martin Reddy Mailing address: AI Center SRI International 333 Ravenswood Avenue Menlo Park, CA 94025-3493 AIC Program:  Perception Project home page at http://www.ai.sri.com/digital-earth

SRI International?s DARPA-sponsored Digital Earth project incorporates a connected suite of technologies with the vision of enabling a massive, scalable, and open model of the planet where millions of users can interact with vast quantities of geographically referenced (georeferenced) data over the Web.

Our goal is to create an open infrastructure that allows anyone around the globe to publish or to search for data based upon a specific location; something which is not possible on the Web today.

As part of this goal, SRI is building the following components to make this vision a reality.

1. GeoWeb - a completely scalable infrastructure for indexing and searching for all georeferenced data on the Internet using the existing Domain Name System (DNS).

2. TerraVision - a freely-available 3D browser for navigating the contents of the GeoWeb. Available for SGI and Windows platforms, and as a Netscape plugin and ActiveX component.

3. GeoVRML - SRI is a proponent of the GeoVRML file format as an open format for representing standards-based 3D geospatial data over the Web.

4. Content Tools - we are building a number of tools to help create and maintain all aspects of the Digital Earth, including managing the GeoWeb, modeling tools, and conversion utilities.

	GeoVRML GeoVRML is an extension to the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML97) to support geographic applications.
	TerraVision TerraVision is a distributed, interactive terrain visualization system developed by SRI International. It allows users to navigate, in real time, through a 3-D graphical representation of a real landscape created from elevation data and aerial images of that landscape. All data can be distributed over the Web and support is provided for overlaying GeoVRML 3D models.
	tsmApi Library The Tile Set Manager (TSM) Application Programming Interface (API) is an Open Source library of high level C functions for reading, writing, and processing the terrain data used by the TerraVision terrain visualization application.

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• Leclerc, Y., Reddy, M., Eriksen, M., Brecht, J., and Colleen, D. SRI’s Digital Earth Project, Technical Note 560. AI Center, SRI International, 333 Ravenswood Ave, Menlo Park, CA 94025, Aug 2002.  [PDF, Details]

• Reddy, M. and Iverson, L. and Leclerc, Y. and Heller, A. GeoVRML: Open Web-based 3D Cartography, in Proceedings of the International Cartographic Conference (ICC2001), Beijing, China, August 2001.  [PDF, Details]

• Leclerc, Y. G. and Reddy, M. and Iverson, L. and Eriksen, M. The GeoWeb --- A New Paradigm for Finding Data on the Web, in Proceedings of the International Cartographic Conference (ICC2001), Beijing, China, August 2001.  [Details]

• Reddy, M and Iverson, L and Leclerc, Y. G. GeoVRML: An Open Format for 3D Geospatial Visualization, in Proceedings of Digital Earth 2001, Fredericton, NB, Canada, June 2001.  [Details]

• Leclerc, Y. G., Reddy, M., Iverson, L. and Eriksen, M. The GeoWeb (aka dot-geo) ? Indexing Data on the Internet by Location, in Proceedings of Digital Earth 2001, Frederiction, NB, Canada, June 2001.  [Details]