Re: Marble, Virtual Globe and World Atlas

That, and other virtual globes are listed at [1]. A very popular one in the scientific community is NASA World Wind -- also open source. The point is, virtual globes are actually a pretty decent sized segment of the geospatial software ecosystem.

Many of these support KML, which is an OGC standard for encoding (and styling) geography in XML [2]. If you want to play around on a developer level, check out the open source libkml [3].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_globe
[2] http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/kml/
[3] http://code.google.com/p/libkml/

-----
Raj Singh
rsingh@opengeospatial.org
+1 (617) 642-9372
The OGC: Making location count...
http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact



On Oct 13, at 8:43 AM, Coralie Mercier wrote:

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I stumbled on this project called Marble:
>    http://edu.kde.org/marble/
> 
> I thought it might be of interest for the POI WG.
> 
> It is similar to google earth, a globe that spins and in which you can
> zoom and search. It uses OSM. Can do routing.
> 
> Here's the abstract from their home page:
> 
> [[
> Marble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn more
> about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up places and
> roads. A mouse click on a place label will provide the respective
> Wikipedia article.
> 
> Of course it's also possible to measure distances between locations or
> watch the current cloud cover. Marble offers different thematic maps: A
> classroom-style topographic map, a satellite view, street map, earth at
> night and temperature and precipitation maps. All maps include a custom
> map key, so it can also be used as an educational tool for use in
> class-rooms. For educational purposes you can also change date and time
> and watch how the starry sky and the twilight zone on the map change.
> 
> In opposite to other virtual globes Marble also features multiple
> projections: Choose between a Flat Map ("Plate carré"), Mercator or the
> Globe.
> 
> The best of all: Marble is Free Software / Open Source Software and
> promotes the usage of free maps. And it's available for all major
> operating systems (Linux/Unix, MS Windows and Mac OS X).
> ]]
> 
> Coralie
> 
> -- 
> Coralie Mercier - Communications Team - Incubator Activity Lead
>               World Wide Web Consortium - http://www.w3.org
>       W3C/ERCIM - N212 - 2004, rte des lucioles - 06410 Biot - FR
> mailto:coralie@w3.org +33492387590 http://www.w3.org/People/CMercier/
>

Received on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 00:46:28 UTC