2008-10-23: Google Earth and Science Applications, Ann Arbor

The purpose of this meeting is to explore scientific investigations that are enabled by global-scale reach and interactivity provided by Google Earth. The meeting was the first of it's kind and depending on the connections and collaborations that come from this meeting, as well as resulting KMLs there may be more.

Oct. 22

The first two talks gave an overview on the state of geoscience and technology.

• Tim Killeen, from NSF, gave the geoscience perspective.
  • One commenter noted that GEOSS was notably missing. Killeen's response was that any of the NSF work could be considered part of GEOSS.

• Dan Atkins, former VP of Cyberinfrastructure and now at U. Mich. gave the second talk on the state of science and technology. He pressed the need for data stewardship, curation, federation and openness. He also described the push/pull nature between technology and complex environmental problems

The second half of the morning was focused on using google earth

• Why is KML important?
• Google Earth Applications
• NASA AMES disaster response application

The afternoon session in the pollution and weather group resulted in a collection of KML layers and sites from people in the group. Pete, a googler in our session, works on Google Earth Weather and listened/tried to solve some of the issues people have with GE as is. Common Issues were:

• Needing underground/underwater layers
• Animation/time line issues
• Layer ordering for transparency
• Ideas about using Sketchup with GE

We went to a beginner KML tutorial.

Oct. 23

We started in our pollution/weather wg with three questions: Q1. What are good examples of visualizations in your topical area that are currently available and what makes them good?

See spreadsheet

Q2. What are the challenges that are being identified in your discussion that are making it more difficult to generate more GE/KML content?

• Creation of polygon(?) surfaces
• Links on left panel
• Interface
  • User's can't reorder layers
• Timeline
  • Author cannot control speed of timeline
  • User limited on speed controls
• New Features
  • Surfaces above surface

Q3. What are some of the best ideas for future work or collaborations that came out of the group discussions?

• Weather Display in Google Earth
  • Representation of pressure surfaces
  • Representation of radar/precip (perhaps include volume composite from radar)
• Below surface representations
  • Water characteristics
  • Well measurements
• Space/Time navigation
  • Move with pollution plumes