Visualizations on a Web-Based 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 presents 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. Only the data needed for the current view and scale need to be processed, so the task of processing the datasets at their native resolution can be circumvented. The resulting system is capable of interactively displaying multiple simultaneous viewpoints, allowing for a multilevel focus+context visualization of the globe. We also present 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.
Description
Keywords
Physical Geography, Remote Sensing, Computer Science
Citation
Sherlock, M. (2017). Visualizations on a Web-Based View-Aware Digital Earth (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28653