Martin Christen
Senior Scientist FHNW - University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland

Biography
Martin Christen is a senior scientist, head of 3D development, and lecturer at the Institute of Geomatics Engineering at the FHNW in Switzerland. Martin is a regular speaker on conferences world-wide and publishes articles related to computer graphics. His main research interest is 3D computer graphics - especially GPU-programming, terrain-rendering, cloud based big data visualization and 3D graphics-engine architecture.

Abstract
OpenWebGlobe - A Technology for Building and Operating National or Global 3D Geoportals in the Cloud

Commercial Virtual Globes (VGs) such as Google Earth have opened up 3D geospatial contents to a wide audience. However, since the main goal of these VGs is to serve as marketing platforms, the operators keep a strict control over their geospatial contents. In this paper we present the OpenWebGlobe open source project and technology (www.openwebglobe.org). It provides a highly scalable cloud-based framework for building and operating VGs or 3D geoportals with custom-built geospatial contents, e.g. geodata by national mapping agencies, and with fully customizable exploitation options on a wide range of platforms and devices. This presentation of OpenWebGlobe addresses the issues of providing and visualizing extremely large geodata in 3D which usually involves an enormous preprocessing effort. An approach for on-the-fly processing, caching and serving of massive geospatial data in a cloud-based environment and for highly scalable 3D scene rendering on a web based virtual globe is presented. Various cloud computing features are used for processing large amounts of geospatial data and for providing 2D and 3D map data to a large number of web clients. Furthermore it is shown how a traditional in-house data center or private cloud for mass data storage can be combined with cloud based services for caching frequently fetched data as a very cost effective approach for providing large amounts of 2D and 3D map data. This service-based data access is supporting on-the-fly processing of basically any kind of geodata, e.g. orthoimagery, map or elevation data, and chaching the data fragments in a cloud environment. The OGC is currently developing a server-side 3D portrayal service (3DPS) interface for accessing 3D geodata servers with support for client-side and server-side rendering of very large datasets. Our service aims to be compatible with this upcoming standard. In our presentation we will be demonstrating and discussing a number of 3D geoportals created by the OpenWebGlobe community, which even include geospatial games.