Cyber-applications as gateway to data-rich Digital Earth systems

Abstract

The underlying vision of the Digital Earth (DE) calls for applications that can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data and allow users to study and analyse of our planet. Since the declaration of this vision in the late 90s, a significant number of DE data-sets have been created by the industry, governments, non-governmental organisations and individuals. An overwhelming majority of the successful applications that use DE data-sets has its end-user applications running on the desktop. While these applications are great tools, they remain inaccessible to the community as a whole. In this paper, we present a framework for the development of cyber-applications. We define an abstract architecture for cyber-applications based on the model-view-controller paradigm, which allows the dynamic inclusion of functional and data components into its execution engine at run-time. We define the operational characteristics of cyber-applications. We also specify the interface of pluggable components to the architecture. Finally, we demonstrate the appropriateness of the abstract architecture by means of a case study.

Keywords:

• digital earth architecture
• cyber-application
• geobrowser
• design framework
• hardware independence

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to the anonymous reviewers, whose critical comments and constructive criticism helped us to improve an earlier version of the paper. Rolf de By's work on this publication was in part supported by the Dutch national program COMMIT (2012).