Virtual globes

I find the upsurge in mapping and mash-ups both a fascinating and significant trend. It was said - once by physicist Fred Hoyle - that once we had an external view of the globe, all our perspectives would change. Well...we've come a long way from the Apollo days - now we have virtual Earths - in plural, many mashed times over - layer upon layer of location tags. We are pinning our own virtual globe. Here is an interesting article:

An editorial in Nature says 'millions of people across the world are zooming in from space,flying across continents,and swooping over mountains and through cities,thanks to Google Earth,NASA's World Wind and other free virtual globes.The ability to model the Earth in exquisite three-dimensional detail was previously only approached on the desktops of professional users of geographical information systems (GIS).But even they were unable to publish high-resolution globes on the Internet,because of the sheer volume of the data,a globe with a resolution of one metre would take years to download using even a fast Internet connection.Virtual globes overcome this problem with elegant engineering, using a tiling structure that sends progressively higher-resolution data as one zooms in.This and other tricks drastically reduce the size of file transfers,and allow visualization with almost zero latency on a decent broadband connection.Scientists are already experimenting with these tools to showcase their research to the public in visually appealing ways and to speed responses to natural disasters.Ultimately,such accurate digital representations promise to anchor and unify much digital information about the Earth,while also helping to integrate the efforts of researchers from many disciplines".

Read Nature here

Again, thanks to Smartmobs