52°North Triturus WorldViz
README file for the 52°North Triturus WorldViz library
52°North Triturus WorldViz supports the development of thematic 3-D visualizations at world scale.
Regarding the traditional visualization pipeline, the framework focuses the mapping step, i.e. the transformation between geo-objects and abstract visualization-objects. Thus, WorldViz allows to generate concrete scene descriptions (e.g., a X3D document) from geo-data, thereby keeping the "cartographic" mapping process configurable.
WorldViz is based on the existing 52°North Triturus module and shall offer various world visualizations, e.g. globes (limited to world-scale), potato-like globe deformations depending on thematic data, feature-space scenes ("attribute space"), visualization of geo-object relations (connection maps in 3-d space) as well as planar map-projections in 3-d space. WorldViz will offer scene export facilities for various concrete scene descriptions (presumably for X3D, X3DOM, KML).
The framework will be used to set-up the experiental space ENE ("Erlebnisraum Nachhaltige Entwicklung") at Bochum University of Applied Science. Both the ENE and this framework are open to anyone who is interested. You are very welcome to participate or to bring in innovative visualization ideas!
Basic functionality:
- Readers for thematic world data (XML-based ENE data) and shape geometries
- Simple scene export (e.g., X3D/X3DOM scene descriptions)
- Generation of globe representations at world-scale
Characteristics
- Development platform: Java (Windows and Linux/Unix)
- Visualization pipeline (filter, mapper, renderer) as reference model
- Abstraction of concrete (geo-)datasources and scene description environments through interfaces
Development goals
The community's vision is to establish a creative surrounding, which allows efficient and sustainable development of innovative software solutions in the context of 3d geovisualization at world scale.
Installation
Since this is a Maven project, the typical Maven installation tasks can be executed to build this project.
To compile the Triturus WorldViz library, simply run Maven's task mvn clean install.
To use the Triturus WorldViz library, just add the WorldViz JAR file to your Java project.
Note that Triturus WorldViz requires the 52°North Triturus library (JAR) which is already included as a dependency in the pom.xml-file.
License information
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2.
For further information please refer to LICENSE-file
Additional documents and links
This sections lists documents that lead to a deeper understanding of the Triturus library and give additional information.
- White Paper of Triturus: http://52north.org/images/stories/52n/communities/3D/triturus%20white%20paper.pdf
- 52°North 3D Community Wiki: https://wiki.52north.org/bin/view/V3d/
- Triturus Wiki: https://wiki.52north.org/bin/view/V3d/Triturus
Contributing
You are interested in contributing to the 52°North Triturus or WorldViz and you want to pull your changes to the 52°North repository to make it available to all?
In that case we need your official permission and for this purpose we have a so called contributors license agreement (CLA) in place. With this agreement you grant us the rights to use and publish your code under an open source license.
A link to the contributors license agreement and further explanations are available here:
http://52north.org/about/licensing/cla-guidelines
Support and Contact
You can get support in the community mailing list and forums:
http://52north.org/resources/mailing-lists-and-forums/
If you encounter any issues with the software or if you would like to see certain functionality added, let us know at:
- Benno Schmidt (b.schmidt@52north.org)
- Christian Danowski (christian.danowski@hs-bochum.de)
- Martin May (m.may@52north.org)
- Adhitya Kamakshidasan (a.kamakshidasan@52north.org)
The 3D Community
52°North Inititative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH, Germany