Extensible 3D (X3D) Earth Technical Requirements Workshop Summary Report

Abstract : The initial X3D Earth Technical Requirement Workshop called together leading experts to determine a broad set of technical requirements that will be necessary to construct an X3D Earth. This workshop was held 14-15 November 2006 at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California, USA. The main goal in the creation of an Extensible 3D (X3D) Earth will be achieved by Web3D Consortium members who are preparing to build a standards-based suite of software tools usable by governments, industry, scientists, academia and the general public. X3D mappings of world terrain, cartography and imagery will be made available for use in any scene, making it easy to geospatially reference and share X3D models. Open standards, the Web architecture, utilization of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and open protocols will be leveraged throughout. Both commercial and open-source software codebases will be able to utilize these best practices and contribute to these shared assets. The goal of this technical requirements workshop was for participants to identify and prioritize the technical requirements, available capabilities, open challenges and strategic partnerships needed for a Web3D working group to execute this ambitious project. Emphasis was placed on extensibly adapting existing resources and in cooperation towards achieving shared goals, especially with other open geospatial organizations and standards. These workshop results document participant contributions, next-step activities and goal milestones. The workshop concluded that X3D Earth is feasible and that the effort can be started now. Many resources are already available, yet work will be needed to make them compatibly available. No showstoppers were discovered; a nice surprise after so many diverse inputs. Finally, lots of collaboration and coordinated work are needed to proceed successfully in order to build a web-services infrastructure and develop a server-side specification to enable X3D Earth.