Interactive Data Styling and Multifocal Visualization for a View-Aware Digital Earth

Abstract

A Discrete Global Grid System (DGGS) is a powerful tool for creating the discrete reference models that support geospatial dataset integration, organization, processing, and visualization in a Digital Earth (DE) application. However, the growing size and scale of geospatial datasets present significant obstacles to the interactivity and accessibility of geospatial visualizations. To address this challenge, we present a portable DGGS that runs in web browsers on a client device and efficiently communicates with a server-side DGGS. In our method, the client-side is responsible for triggering queries for missing data, managing the viewing area, and rendering various styles and effects. The server is responsible for generating data representations for DGGS cells in response to queries from clients. The resulting system is capable of interactively displaying multiple simultaneous viewpoints which enable support for multilevel focus+context visualization on the globe. We also provide several real-time data styling techniques that are designed to work efficiently on both the client and server. These methods help make DE more accessible and informative than ever before.