ABSTRACT

Globe-based Digital Earth (DE) is a promising system that uses 3D models of the Earth for integration, organization, processing, and visualization of vast multiscale geospatial datasets. The growing size and scale of geospatial datasets present significant obstacles to interactive viewing and meaningful visualizations of these DE systems. To address these challenges, we present a novel web-based multiresolution DE system using a hierarchical discretization of the globe on both server and client sides. The presented web-based system makes use of a novel data encoding technique for rendering large multiscale geospatial datasets, with the additional capability of displaying multiple simultaneous viewpoints. Only the data needed for the current views and scales are encoded and processed. We leverage the power of GPU acceleration on the client-side to perform real-time data rendering and dynamic styling. Efficient rendering of multiple views allows us to support multilevel focus+context visualization, an effective approach to navigate through large multiscale global datasets. The client–server interaction as well as the data encoding, rendering, styling, and visualization techniques utilized by our presented system contribute toward making DE more accessible and informative.

摘要

基于地球的数字地球（DE）是一种很有前途的系统，该系统使用地球的3D模型对庞大的多尺度地理空间数据集进行集成，组织，处理和可视化。地理空间数据集的规模和规模不断增长，给这些DE系统的交互式查看和有意义的可视化带来了重大障碍。为了解决这些挑战，我们提出了一种新颖的基于Web的多分辨率DE系统，该系统在服务器端和客户端均使用了地球的分层离散化。提出的基于Web的系统利用一种新颖的数据编码技术来渲染大型多尺度地理空间数据集，并具有显示多个同时视点的附加功能。仅对当前视图和比例尺所需的数据进行编码和处理。我们利用客户端的GPU加速功能来执行实时数据渲染和动态样式。高效地呈现多个视图使我们能够支持多级焦点+上下文可视化，这是一种在大型多尺度全局数据集中导航的有效方法。我们提出的系统所使用的客户端与服务器的交互以及数据编码，渲染，样式和可视化技术有助于使DE更易于访问和提供更多信息。