INTEGRATING VIRTUAL GLOBES AND WEB SERVICE TECHNOLOGIES FOR HIGHER-EDUCATION TEACHING AND RESEARCH

The emergence of Virtual Globe software systems off er tremendous opportunities, such as providing a ne w g neration of learning tools to help students digest large-scale geospatia l information about the world, and supporting domai n expert analyses in an interactive three-dimensional virtual environment. I the meantime, Web Service technologies, especial ly those standards-based interoperable geospatial services, make a large amo unt of geo-processing functionalities easily access ible to educational users and researchers like their local resources. This paper presents a recent effort funded by an ISPRS Scientif ic Initiative project to integrate Virtual Globes and Web Service technologies for hig her-education teaching and research. The integratio n combines the visualization and communication power of Virtual Globes with the powerful analysis functionalities of geospatial Web Services to help students and researchers investigate various scientific prob lems in an environment with natural and intuitive u ser experiences. This integration will provide analysis-enhanced Virtual G obes for in-classroom teaching and scientific res earch. Reports on recent progresses are provided.