On Three-Dimensional Digital Earth Application Development Framework and Its Applications

Digital Earth has the extraordinary ability of integrating multi-source, heterogeneous, multi-scale spatial and temporal information with three dimensional, dynamic and interactive features and provides abundant visualization methods of temporal analysis and statistics. A kind of novel applications were developed based on Three-dimensional Digital Earth Application Development Framework, namely WikiGlobe ADF. It provides a new perspective for people understand and discover various kinds of knowledge about our living planet. These applications can be widely used in fields of education, humanity, history and tourism. Their properties of user participation and lightweight can satisfy the needs of developing personalized thematic applications and provide a well-interactive platform of spatial information service for the public. In this paper, the application characters and current trends of digital earth was analyzed, and architecture of WikiGlobe ADF was described then, the features and the realization mechanism of the framework were discussed. Based on the work above, several examples developed through the WikiGlobe ADF were presented.