Show the World the Data!

    The Challenge

    NASA’s open data sources hold an abundance of imagery. Mapping that imagery to a digital globe makes the data interactive and may enable people to discover relationships among ecosystem phenomena. Your challenge is to develop a digital globe web-app that visualizes Earth science data using NASA’s Web WorldWind.

    Background

    NASA’s open data sources hold an abundance of imagery. Mapping that imagery to a digital globe makes the data interactive and may enable people to discover relationships among ecosystem phenomena. Using a digital globe, such as NASA’s Web WorldWind, this Space Apps challenge involves developing and deploying an interactive web app that enables exploration. A web-app that presents single view of the Earth could present one or more layers of imagery. A web-app multiple views of the Earth can provide side-by-side views of two sets of imagery. A few web-apps have already been developed using NASA’s Web WorldWind. Figure 1 presents a screen shot of NASA World. Figure 2 presents a screenshot of Quake Hunter. Both of these web apps were developed with Web WorldWind.

    NASA World Weather

    Figure 1: NASA World Weather

    Quake Hunter

    Figure 2: Quake Hunter

    Skill Level

    This Space Apps Challenge requires JavaScript programming skills, an understanding of how to use Application Programming Interfaces (API), and knowledge on how to deploy a web-app. The resources section will provide links to NASA Web WorldWind web app examples and API documentation; also, the resources will provide keywords on how to search for information about web-app hosting. Examples of products from this challenge include: (a) a video presentation that demonstrates a web-app and explains which data sets were used, or (b) a deployed digital globe data visualization web-app.

    Keywords for researching web-app hosting include:

    • web-app hosting
    • code repositories
    • how to deploy a javascript web-app
    • what is a web service
    • geospatial web services

    The following links leads to NASA Web WorldWind open source 3D globe library, tutorials, documentation, and examples of web-apps developed with NASA Earth science imagery and data from other federal government agencies.