[OSGeo-Discuss] 3d geoweb - Digital Earth - reference model

[Mike Liebhold]

Dear Friends, ( please forgive cross posting )

I've been thinking a lot about 3D GIS lately, about interoperability of
3D objects in real world - virtual worlds like Google earth, Microsoft-
virtual earth, NASA wwind, ESRI ARCglobe, companies like Autodesk have
large legacy 3D GIS &CAD systems still moving forward, and  no doubt
someone like Linden Labs will launch a 3d social apps in a real world -
virtual world..  based on geo coordinates instead of 2nd life's random
geography, and even mobile 3Dgis is quickly showing glimmers of
promise:  mobile augmented reality developers will  likely build  a
geocoded 3D frameworks to hang links on... for services like nokia's
MARA prototype (http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18291/) ... and
a consensus 3D geoweb like GEON  ( http://www.geongrid.org/about.html)
will also be the basis for the worldwide sensorweb, eg. for
trans-disciplinary problem solving like macro-ecology, climate models,
zoonautic, ( animal born disease) emergency response, &&

Will we have multiple 3D geowebs?  beyond harmonized 2D geodata and
geocoded hypermedia, will 3D data  and media producers and service
operators have to produce  and manage multiple frameworks ( including
places, buildings, things - people& avatars ) for each or these
environments?

So,  following digital earth, champion, Tim Foresman's lead  - (As
Director of Digtal Earth programs for NASA working for vp gore, Tim lead
the first  DERM  - A reference model in the Federal Geospatial Data
Committee and ISO communities in collaboration with the original NASA
led Interagency Working Group on Digital Earth.   That work is now off
on a dusty shelf, out of date, given  the future requirements.)

I'll be leading sessions at Where2.0
(http://conferences.oreillynet.com/where2007/) and  ISDE5
(http://www.isde5.org/)   to raise questions leading to  re-starting
considering of a consensus reference specification, for a 3D geoweb - a
a standard Digital Earth.  google, no doubt,  sees kml as the answer to
these questions, and MS is, no doubt  brewing up their own too,  clearly
the big guys are going to duke it out from very proprietary
perspectives, and it's still not clear that the US gov, OGC, W3C, OR
SIGGRAPH communities like x3D focusing on vrml, offers the integrated
perspective of the participatoryGIS, FOSS4G and digital graphic arts
communities, here, capability to develop  detailed optimum requirements
from wide perspectives:

Let's start again considering, as communities,  a meta level layered
architectural description for unified earth and geo-related computing,
refining a model including the following topics ( and others) into an
ideally coherent and rigorous framework for optimally sharing and using
data across all web, geospatial and scientific contexts:

* geodesics, where experts are still refining descriptions of the shape
of the earth, and where new coordinate systems are argued.
* sensor data generation and labelling
* geodata and hypermedia coding/decoding/transcoding
* open source networked geodata -libraries and feeds- of raw sensor
data, streaming media, tiles, 3D objects , 2Dvectors, polygons, points,
text, etc.)
* geo metadata models - formal ontologies, logical description, as
frameworks for mining informal users' tag systems
* geo server and middleware models for efficient saving, searching, and
sharing of all kinds of geodata
* sensemanking inference and other spatial intelligence
* rendering  software for combining many sources of geodata into unified
useful views for many kinds of interaction
* user software/ sharing/saving/serving/searching/rendering
* human interaction systems,  avatars and social nets,  gis, mobile gis,
3Digs,  geoaudio, augmented reality, haptics
* autonomous sensor networks processing geodata.
* meta scale geosciences exploring large transdiscipline problem spaces
like planetary meteorology, large scale ecosystem modeling,
human-ecosystem interaction models, large scale,  emergency response,...

These are just penciled place holder layers of a hypothetical reference
model - that will need to be refined by the appropriate communities.

I  have no idea how to organize a coherent dialog between the e-mail
list communities cc'd here. right  now, maybe somewhat  loosely
connected dialog will be fine. later perhaps starting at where2.0 and
ISDE5, maybe some kind of 3D geoweb wiki communities will coalesce to
start organizing these consensus interoperable models.

See you in San Jose and Berkeley!!

Mike

Mike Liebhold
Senior Researcher
Institute for the Future