Welcome to WG IV/4:

Virtual Globes and Context-Aware Visualisation/Analysis

Our mission:

The term virtual globe is being used frequently to refer to a virtual and digital global environment enabled by advanced information technologies. It is capable of letting users freely fly anywhere on a virtual Earth, with different views of Earth such as satellite imagery, geographical features, terrain, 3D buildings, and advanced stars, atmosphere or sunlight effects. More specifically, it allows users to fuse heterogeneous geospatial data from multiple sources, conduct network-based local-to-global multi-resolution visualization, and share data with others. The wide popularity of virtual globe softwares including Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth in the geospatial and general communities inspires more ways of exploring and using virtual globes. Context-aware visualization and analysis is a particularly important part of these activities, as it can continuously fit the current user’s situation or operating environment. When combined with 2D and 3D geospatial Web services, virtual globes can support data analysis, information extraction and even knowledge discovery.

The working group IV/4 aims at bringing together researchers in the field of virtual globes and context-aware visualisation/analysis. We are focused on promoting efforts towards the goals of the WG as expressed in its terms of reference, as well as keeping close co-operation with ISPRS and other related stakeholders.
 

Terms of Reference:

• Assessment of remote sensing data for generating and visualizing landscape and  models;

• Database generation for digital topographic and thematic mapping(including orthoimages and digital terrain models);

• Integration of multi-source and multi-scale data in local and regional landscape modelling and visualization applications;

• Application of dynamic models for integrating multi-temporal landscape data sets;

• Application and assessment of advanced visualization,virtual reality and multimedia methods for 2-D,3-D and 4-D mapping tasks in stand-alone,mobile or web-based environments;

• Use of virtual globes for geospatial data integration,visualization and analysis;

• Assessment of context-aware visualization and analysis of image data and geodatabases.