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Google Earth “GIS” – Part 1

I've been working a lot with Google Earth (GE) recently. In fact, it's a running joke at work these days that Google Earth is a panacea the be-all-end-all of everything, and around the SSRC I'm your GE go-to guy. This is mostly because our boss likes to show off some of our research that I've made available for viewing in GE. For many people, the visualization of "unseen" social science data in this new way is quite an eye-opener; most are quite impressed and have never seen anything quite like it. And to be fair, some of these people have not seen a lot of social data mapped much at all. Sure, many have seen the maps in newspapers that show how bad the obesity "epidemic" is in the US (led by Mississippi of course), but GIS use in the social sciences is still somewhat limited. Don't get me wrong here, GIS has been used by social scientists for a long time now, but I think that the percent who are using it effectively is still relatively small. At least that's what I've gathered from the few conferences I've been to and from the people traveling through my office to see the "Google Earth demo."

There's a great debate going on in the GIS world of whether or not Google Earth is or is not "GIS," of whether it's good or not for the GIS profession(al), whether it should be embraced or shun, and of course what better alternatives are available. My opinion is that GE can play a great role in visualizing and sharing certain kinds of data. It is by no means a panacea, and it is only superficially a GIS. But it does some things really well. One of those is 3D visualization. One of the first datasets I brought into GE was veteran population data for each county in the US. That's roughly 3,500 polygons of odd shapes and sizes that must be shown in three-dimensional form. I had used GE a little in my previous job at Oak Ridge National Lab for visualizing 3D data, but hadn't gone much farther than playing with it, and there have been some significant updates to the program since I did, but I still wanted to try out some other software to see which one best fit my need.

One program I tried out was WorldWind. This is an open-source 3D world viewer developed at NASA which improves significantly with each major release they have, and I intend to keep going back to WorldWind to try it out. But one thing it did not handle well when I tried it was the dispaly of every US county in three dimensions. I also wanted to try ESRI ArcGIS Explorer, since ESRI is the GIS equivalent of Microsoft. Again, it choked just trying to load the data. (They have released a couple of versions since I tried it, so I need to go back and see how much better it has gotten). Recently, Microsoft Virtual Earth has gotten a lot of attention, and some of its features are incredible (who knew they would have "Bird's Eye" photography of Starkville?!), but I don't know that I can even create the 3D data I'm dealing with without having to use the 3D modeling program that they recommend. And I know that right now, there's no way it would handle every county in a fluid manner.

But by golly, you load up those counties into Google Earth and it hardly even phases it. You can fly around in a smooth manner, examining the data in all different directions. And to me, to us, that can be a powerful tool.