Patrick Hogan will be one of the Keynote speakers at this year’s NATO Geographical Information Processing and Visual Analytics for Environmental Security conference at Buonconsiglio Castle which is located at Trento, Italy.

You can see Patrick’s Presentation, Nasa World Wind Advanced Interactive Visualization and Analysis, on Day 3 of the event.

Got sent this last night and it is actually kind of funny and shows how little the media really knows.  But, to get picked at #5 though.. guess that is worth something.

Translated text:

Top-victims
Fifth place: NASA World Wind
NASA World Wind is still further development, but it is software which fell prey to Google. The main reason is the release of Google Earth.

Beside satellite images the program shows also overlays and useful information like restaurants and sights. Furthermore there are more detailed satellite images especially from Europe.

Google’s goals (making money) and NASA’s goals (distributing information) using Virtual Globes are two different monsters.

While NASA WW has fallen to a niche market of uses and developers (WW Java is in more places than Google could only dream of getting into and being used for), its goal was never intended to be a competitor of Google’s.

Been spending the last 30 minutes or so browsing through the new NASA Science Website.  This is a very nice site that is loaded to the brim with great information.

I like how it is broken in information for Researches, Educators, Kids and Citizen Scientists for some specific information for those groups of users; and divides the content into Earth centric, Sun centered, Planets and Astrophysics.

But.. no mention of NASA WorldWind though…

The plug in integrates The International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) data for Africa in WorldWind.  In WorldWind, you can view their datasets, but most importantly, click on points and it brings up graphs of variables such as rainfall.

The IRI was founded on the belief that scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of climate can help developing countries defeat persistent and often devastating problems.  Climate has an impact on health, water, agriculture and most other vital sectors, giving us the opportunity to help societies confront a whole range of hardships-from malaria epidemics to food shortages.

You can download the plug-in from here.  Below shows the plug-in in use.  Bull_UK also has more details.

After installing and activating the plug-in, you launch it from the toolbar menu.

Once loaded, you can select the dataset to view, the time period, view the map legend and data description and load the selected map.

Looks like the biggest (at at least biggest list of features / fixes) to date is out now.  You can download it from the NASA WWJava Page.  Pat Murris has a blog posting with several of the major changes he has noticed.

In brief:

• - Configuration made consistent and independent
• - Configuration defaults moved to usage sites
• - Logging mechanism and semantics cleaned up
• - Shutdown entry point
• - Package refactoring
• - Memory cache refactoring and optimization
• - Reimplementation of Polylines. Polylines on surface.
• - Shapes (but the Surface versions will be superseded in next release)
• - Shape and icon dragging
• - Math classes re-engineering
• - View and input handling changes
• - Examples — see src/gov/nasa/worldwind/examples
  • - Template for WWJ apps
  • - Template for WWJ panels
  • - WMS Manager
  • - Layer manager
• - More general icon image specification
• - WMS capabilities doc parsing
• - WMS layer specification improved
• - WMS Layer Manager
• - Thread-safe icon collections in IconLayer
• - RPF parsing and display
• - Applet example and javascript interface
• - New layers
  • - Country boundaries
  • - USGS Topo
  • - Stars
  • - Fog
  • - Scalebar
  • - World Map
  • - Terrain Profiler
• - Layer panel utility
• - Performance statistics utility
• - Bug fixes
• - Instrumentation and Run-time statistics
• - Texture cache
• - Proxy support
• - Anaglyph stereo

Interesting little rant on the MarketWatch site that deals with Google leasing some airport parking space at Moffett Field.

As clever as doing a deal for access to a NASA airstrip may be, it’s just not worthy of the world’s new media titans. They won’t really have made it big until they get their own private parking spot at the space station.