Abstract

Google Earth has become a worldwide phenomena that has opened millions of people's eyes to the potential capabilities of Virtual Globes. However, it is the concurrent development of Keyhole Markup Language (KML) that has provided the best method for people to visualize their own datasets within these Globes. This has been particularly true for the earth sciences where there is an abundance of geographically located data, but not every researcher or educator has the resources or technical expertise to manipulate this data using traditional GIS resources. KML provides a simple method for users to visualize their data in Google Earth, Google Maps, and since its Open Geospatial Consortium designation as a best practice, an increasing number of other Geobrowsers. In the case of the Google browsers many KML features can be created directly through the interface and don't even require the user to directly view any code. As both KML capabilities and scientists' understanding of the language have evolved, visualizations that have become more dynamic and increasingly complex. These creations have come to the attention of other scientists and the public general through the Google Earth Community forum. Many interesting and imaginative uses of KML in science exist on these pages, but locating them can often be difficult due to the large volume of content. Google's KML archive and Google Earth Blog's science listings have provided filtering for much of this content, but opportunity still exists for a quality controlled archive of science-dedicated KML. At the University of Alaska we are developing an archive that fills this need.

Presentation

Poster
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