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The purpose of this meeting is to explore scientific investigations that are enabled by global-scale reach and interactivity provided by Google Earth. These discussions will occur during a two-day meeting organized in collaboration between Google and the University of Michigan. Faculty, students, and members of the research community from all over the country will be attending. The meeting will be organized in working-groups that combine scientists and members of the Google community in an effort to explore new applications and areas for development

Target Audience

  • Academics and students from diverse backgrounds that share a common interest in open information exchange and visualization of data.
  • Research professionals interested in finding new ways to communicate their work with the public
  • Policy makers interested in influencing the public debate with greater access to tools and information

Outcomes

For Participants

  • To learn about the enabling characteristics of KML and Google Earth (GE) to visualize, communicate, and share data.
  • To learn from colleagues and the Google Earth team how to best use the software tools enabled by KML.
  • To provide input to Google Earth team to stimulate further development.

For Partnering Institutions

  • Advertise their activities and resources to a broad audience.
  • Generate connections with Google and the academic community outside of the traditional framework.
  • To generate more valuable content in KML.
  • Chance to shape future activities in this area.

Organization

The meeting has two distinct organizational elements. Plenary sessions provide a stage for high-visibility talks. Group sessions are topical in nature and combine specialists of a given field of research. For a schedule click here.

Plenary Session Talks

Plenary sessions will include presentations by Tim Killeen, Assistant Director for Geosciences, National Science Foundation, Dan Atkins, Professor, School of Information and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Michigan and former Director of the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

Working Groups

Participants of the conference can sign up from 8-11 working groups which provide a topical emphasis of a given subset of participants. Each working group is led by 2 organizers whose basic responsibility is to provide structure, the working group time and to provide a public summary on day 2. The final selection of working group topics is pending input from partners and the availability of working group leaders. Each working group should have no less than 25 members.

The following is a sample of the working group topics.

  • Archeology: To map out the evolutionary path of societies, by combining imagery and spatially relevant data of archeological nature.
  • Astronomy & Planetary Science: To relate earth and space-based data sources from many stellar objects. To provide a collaborative space for the successful analysis of such observations done by a global community.
  • Demographic and Socioeconomic: To relate relevant data-sets from a broad set of fields (i.e., crime, economic distribution, growth etc) and to explore dependences between these data sets on a regional and global scale.
  • Disease Tracking, Disaster Response: To provide geographically ordered, up-to-date information to inform of global, regional, and local events from often inaccurate and distributed data-sources.
  • Global Climate Change: To relate and visualize large amounts of global data, in time and space. To enable interacting with these data in a meaningful fashion, and to provide regionally relevant subsets of global data.
  • Pollution: To provide and disseminate pollution data with vastly varying resolution. To disseminate these data in a meaningful matter so they can be used in concert with other data sets, or made actionable for the user. There is a strong coupling to the weather topic, particularly for airborne pollutants.
  • Science Education: To explain the global relation of regions and their geographic, demographic and socioeconomic data. To make these data available so they are correct, correctable, and so that the availability of these data are known and stable over long time-periods.
  • Urban Planning & Infrastructure: To understand the evolution of cities, towns and villages around the Earth, and relate them to their causes and consequences, such as the evolution of traffic patterns, illnesses etc.
  • Weather: To provide weather data personalized for users within sufficient time and measures of accuracy. There is a strong coupling to the pollution topic, particularly for airborne pollutants.

Tutorial Sessions

During the event, members of the Google Earth team will hold several tutorial and how-to sessions to help both new and seasoned users learn how to utilize KML, Google Earth, and other resources to display and share their data. Beginner and advanced sessions will be held with plenty of emphasis on examples, techniques, and existing solutions for common tasks.

Beginner Topics

  • What is KML and how is it used with Google Earth, Maps, and Sky?
  • Tour of existing resources and tools for getting started with projects.
  • Summary of examples showing how they were done with emphasis on network links.

Advanced Topics

  • Server side KML generation.
  • LibKML and other code.google resources.
  • Optimization methods for large KML datasets.
  • Q&A on topics of interest.