EarthSLOT: A case-study on serving your own virtual globe for academic
purposes
Matt Nolan,
Peter Prokein
University of Alaska Fairbanks, 525 Duckering
Bldg, Fairbanks, AK 99775-5860, United States
In late 2003, we launched our virtual globe, which we called EarthSLOT: An Earth Science Logistics and Outreach Terrainbase. At the time it was launched, there were no other virtual globe tools available that offered such high resolution data on a spinning globe for free, and our motivation for creating it was to facilitate all aspects of earth sciences. EarthSLOT is powered by the Skyline Software suite of tools, which includes all the tools needed to merge imagery and elevation data of any resolution onto a spinning globe, serve it over the internet, and allow users to view or customize it. Our base imagery is the same 15 m global Landsat mosaic later used by Google Earth, as well as SRTM and higher resolution DEMs. This talk will discuss the evolution of EarthSLOT, lessons learned after several years of serving our own virtual globe, and some thoughts for those who are also considering hosting their own to get complete control over content and use, or for teaching purposes.