Moving KML geometry elements within Google Earth

Abstract

During the process of modeling and visualizing geospatial information on the Google Earth virtual globe, there is an increasing demand to carry out such operations as moving geospatial objects defined by KML geometry elements horizontally or vertically. Due to the absence of the functionality and user interface for performing the moving transformation, it is either hard or impossible to interactively move multiple geospatial objects only using the existing Google Earth desktop application, especially when the data sets are in large volume. In this paper, we present a general framework and associated implementation methods for moving multiple KML geometry elements within Google Earth. In our proposed framework, we first load KML objects into the Google Earth plug-in, and then extract KML geometry elements from the imported KML objects. Subsequently, we interactively control the movement distance along a specified orientation by employing a custom user interface, calculate the transformed geographic location for each KML geometry element, and adjust geographic coordinates of the points in each KML objects. And finally, transformed KML geometry elements can be displayed in Google Earth for 3D visualization and spatial analysis. A key advantage of the proposed framework is that it provides a simple, uniform and efficient user interface for moving multiple KML geometry elements within Google Earth. More importantly, the proposed framework and associated implementations can be conveniently integrated into other customizable Google Earth applications to support interactively visualizing and analyzing geospatial objects defined by KML geometry elements.