Dapple
Dapple, NASA World Wind and Google Earth
NASA World Wind and Google Earth have demonstrated that looking at data on the globe is a powerful and insightful way to work with spatial data. Dapple is intended to harness this global viewing ability to make finding and viewing of network-hosted spatial data useful and important to geoscientists.
Google Earth uses the global viewing model to display useful spatial information for many kinds of every-day personal needs. But from a functional perspective Google Earth is very limited in the types of data that can be accessed. Through the use of KML, Google earth can be extended to show some of these data types, but the KML must be created somehow, sites must be modified to support the non-standard Google protocols, and knowledge of the sites must be known to the user. There are hundreds of useful sites that provide very useful geoscience data using the open WMS protocol, and a growing number of internet and corporate sites that use the more powerful Geosoft DAP protocols, neither of which can be accessed from Google earth. Further, Google Earth is proprietary technology that requires payment of a license fee for professional use.
NASA World Wind is similarly powerful technology sponsored by NASA and developed and supported through an open-source community. World Wind aims to serve many disciplines that are concerned with the Earth and other astronomical areas. As such, it has broad functionality and, in our opinion, a certain level of complexity that is a barrier to more wide-spread use.
Dapple is derived from NASA World Wind, and is also freely available and supported through an open-source project sponsored by Geosoft. With Dapple, we are able to take those parts of NASA World Wind that are the most useful to geoscientists and make them work for our community. We have focused Dapple on the job of “data browsing”, and we have created a much simpler and more intuitive interface. Effective data browsing also means focus on open standards and server technologies like WMS and Geosoft DAP.
To make Dapple as simple as possible, we have not included any NASA World Wind features that are not useful for our community, or which have proven to be unstable in our testing. Those features that are very useful, such as WMS viewing, we have included and improved on them significantly if necessary to make them easy to use and error-free. As Dapple evolves, we intend to continue to add new NASA World Wind features that add value to dapple users, and we will insure they are easy to use and bug-free.