7 replies to this topic

[christine.skl]

Hello, dear Geo-Friends!

I have a question to you. I got two very interesting to me suggestions for an an undergraduate thesis topics. Which one would you choose personally? My criteria of choice are - usefullness in future and amount of cartography knowledge needed. I would love to hear your, professional opinion - I am not as experienced as some of participants on this forum.


The suggestions of my advisor are:

1. Using ArcGloble to set up a World Travelling Service Center on Internet？
2. Using open-code program（Nasa World Wind） to build a globe map.

Thank you very much, I will be grateful for your coments.

[Matthew Hampton]

I would choose World Wind project. I am not too sure you could build a World Travelling Service Center on ArcGloble.

[frax]

What kind of world map would it be for option 2? I am not sure what "World Travelling Service Center" means for option 1...

To tell the truth, none of these really catch my interest that deeply, and I think it would be less cartography and more GIS/programming/data handling for these.

[christine.skl]

Thanks for your replies, because they gave me some thoughts.

This is all I know by now, because my advisor is out of town. On the other hand these are the most cartographic topics for this year - rest requires even more programming. Unfortunatelly our cartography professor refused to be an advisor. I am more thinking of Nasa World Wind option.

[dsl]

I've never used ArcGlobe for anything, but I don't know if you can create an interactive application with it. I thought it was just for movies. If you can create an interactive application, then I suspect everyone that uses it will need to have ArcGlobe installed on their machine. Again, I've never used it.

I've started using WorldWind for my own project. The World Wind project is very well done, although I find downloading the data is much slower than Google Earth. It's Java based and you can use it in an applet. I have struggled finding good explanations on the structure of World Wind, but on the other hand they have loads of examples for you to sift through. My biggest struggle is using Java, which I find to be very frustrating to work with. Just search on how you can create a media player with Java and you'll see what I mean. It makes me wish someone smarter than I would port it over to ActionScript and Papervision 3d.

Since your project sounds internet based you might look into the Google Earth Plugin. This would require javascript as opposed to Java.

Hope that helps,
David

[christine.skl]

Thanks a lot dsl! I was also puzzled with the ArcGlobe thing...cause I haven't used it ever for anything... this is starting to help a lot, esepcially that I have 6 days left for final decision.

[frax]

The thing is also that I am not sure who strong World Wind is an open source project... I don't know how dependent it is on NASA support for instance, and how active development is.

[christine.skl]

to frax - I did manage to find some support forums (pretty vivid), whereas I don't see anything about the ArcGlobe. Thanks for your question - an important one to consider.