Got passed the URL for this journal yesterday and I have been reading the articles for the last day. It contains some very well written articles on the use of Digital Earth’s in various ways. The International Journal of Digital Earth is the journal of the International Society For Digital Earth (ISDE) and this is the first issue of the Journal.

Here are the topics covered in this issue:

Review Articles

Evolution and implementation of the Digital Earth vision, technology and society
Author: T. W. Foresman

Geoinformatics and digital earth initiatives: a German perspective
Author: M. Ehlers

Research Articles

The use cases of digital earth
Author: M. F. Goodchild

Digital Earth in support of global change research
Authors: C. Shupeng; J. van Genderen

Virtual Australia: its key elements – know, think, communicate
Authors: B. Thompson; T. O. Chan; R. Slee; P. Kinne; A. Jahshan; P. Woodgate; I. Bishop; D. McKenzie

Reality-based generation of virtual environments for digital earth
Author: A. Gruen

Virtual representations of antique globes – new ways of touching the untouchable
Authors: F. Hruby; A. Riedl; H. Tomberger

Monitoring the source of trans-national dust storms in north east Asia
Authors: R. Tsolmon; L. Ochirkhuyag; T. Sternberg

Water resource applications with RADARSAT-2 – a preview
Authors: B. Brisco; R. Touzi; J. J. van der Sanden; F. Charbonneau; T. J. Pultz; M. D’Iorio

Letters

3D visualisations in simulations of future land use: exploring the possibilities of new, standard visualisation tools
Authors: J. Rodríguez Lloret; N. Omtzigt; E. Koomen; F. S. de Blois

Reclamation areas and their development studied by vegetation indices
Author: L. Halounová

Original Articles

Report on the 5th International Symposium on Digital Earth
Author: T. W. Foresman

First Announcement and Call for Papers

Digital Earth Summit on Geoinformatics: Tools for Global Change Research

One thing I noticed with the few articles I have read so far, the do not consider Google Earth to be a very good medium for data, and they considered NASA WorldWind and ArcGIS Explorer to be Digital Globes that are more what the guidelines recommend.

Two articles of interest that I have read so far are “Evolution and implementation of the Digital Earth vision, technology and society” and “The use cases of digital earth”, these two articles have useful information for anyone wanting to explain about digital globes and if/why they may be of use for a project.

Slashgeo actually posted something that deals with WorldWind before I found out about it first for once   In this case a article from GIM International that talks about “Comparing 3D-Earth Viewers”.  In this article they talk about Google Earth, WorldWind and Virtual Earth.  Hmm, no GIS Explorer?  James is going to be sad

Back to the article.  It is an interesting read when you look at it from the opening paragraph that sets up the whole article:

A 3D-Earth viewer enables navigating through the virtual environment and can be easily downloaded from the internet. How might this rapid development support steady, long-term development of institutions such as Rijkswaterstaat, the roads and water regulatory authority of the Netherlands? The authors consider and compare three standard 3D-Earth viewers: Google Earth, MSN Virtual Earth 3D and NASA’s World Wind. Each is combined with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Services to examine their performance in disseminating geo-information to the general public. While Google Earth proves technically superior, other aspects must also be considered.

So, they are looking at it from the aspect of a local government use in the Netherlands.  But it not “really a comparison” of WorldWind, Google Earth and Virtual Earth, because all the authors really focus on is just WMS support of the three.  And to be honest, they did not look that deeply into how they can add WMS to World Wind.  They did have some good points that the build in WMS viewer could use some more tweaking.  But they would have had more control if they had tried one of the other methods of adding a WMS layer to World Wind.

The user can add and turn off WMS layers, making visualisation more effective. This is in direct contrast to World Wind, which cannot show more than one WMS image at a time, rendering geo-related decision making and visualisation difficult.

Wish they would have consulted as they were writing this article..  This comment is oh so incorrect

But, is still an interesting read.

I finally got a chance to really use my Christmas present, Streets 2007 with GPS unit. Got it from amazon for $99 (yes, present to myself ) and so far, I think it is very well worth it.

Wanted to review this before.. but I never had a chance to use it too much till I went to the Virtual Globes Symposium on Friday. It came in quite handy in directing me to the location.

The GPS unit is a Pharos 500 which has SiRF star III technology in it. This means it is really accurate. Using VisualGPS on my notebook I saw that I was tracking up to 12 satellites and my accuracy was, at it’s best tracking, 2 to 3 feet off from my location.. a yard or LESS accuracy!

So, this works nice when driving and you have the navigation assistance on. You get voice prompts tell you where and when to turn.

With the GPS pane turned on and the GPS unit enabled, you get an arrow on the map marking your location and speed shown in the GPS panel. What I didn’t like is that you have no GPS information though. You don’t know what your signal strength is or how many satellites you are tracking. You can download the free version of VisualGPS to get this information. It is a very nice piece of software that gives you all the GPS information you could ever want.

All and all I am impressed with the software and the GPS unit. They work quite well together. And the GPS unit also works in World Wind with the GPS Plug-in. The only real gripes I have at this time is the lack of GPS monitoring ability and that the GPS turn-by-turn assistance won’t help you if you get off your route. Other than saying “Off route” it will not help you get back on the route.
This is worth it if you don’t want to spend $400 or more for an in-car navigation system.