3D Interactive Map of the World Depends on Open Standards

The staff at Ping Interactive Broadband in Australia is tackling a problem as big as the earth. For some time the team has dreamed of a 3D interactive, Web-based world map. The application, they hope, will include a hypermedia viewer that renders geographic information in high-definition real time 3D over broadband networks. Another key idea: the platform will allow users to publish data into the system. With a grant from Telstra Broadband Fund, the project, called 3D Metanet Atlas Platform (3map), is moving right along.

There are a number of interesting aspects to this project. One is that the resulting software will be free (released under GPL, GNU Public License) and implement open standards. Says Chris Thorne, one of Ping's directors, "All Digital Earth style initiatives so far have petered out because they lost political favor, lost funding, were too large for the backing organizations or hit technology challenges." Thorne feels that "open source and open standards appear to be the best way to build this community and we hope to build such momentum that it will push us to the goal with unstoppable force."

He notes that prior digital earth type initiatives were built on proprietary products, without regard to standards. "No one started from the beginning to make the core layer of software both built on open standards and free."

As the project moves forward, Ping plans to support a long list of OpenGIS Specifications including Simple Features Specification (SFS), Geography Markup Language, and Web Map Service. Other likely candidates include existing and upcoming specifications for coordinate transformations, gazetteers and catalog services and perhaps others. "Basically we will support whatever open standards are appropriate. We will also be focusing on XML and using Virtual Reality standards like [Extensible 3D Graphics] X3D. We will also need to implement a superset of SFS as we need to include the 3rd dimension and time as well."

Why are OpenGIS Specifications so important to the project?  "Because we want to be able to discover geographic information that is "out there" [available] in response to a query. Servers that conform to common standards will be accessible. We also want to increase the chances of interoperability - to transfer and import information into our own databases. The OGC specs have very wide support so they are a good choice."

OpenGIS Specifications will help the application reach its potential in a variety of areas including "real estate, military mission planning and briefing, farming, environmental planning, city planning, anything really," says Thorne. He continues, "The idea is not to put a whole lot of stuff on the net and hope people will find uses for it. The idea is to have the platform and demonstrate its capability. Then we can look at what we do in the context of business and government and see what improvements we can offer. We want to illustrate how everyday work can benefit from Web-based virtual information discovery and visualization system."

Milestones are being met, and Ping expects a public beta toward the end of 2003.