Abstract
Abstract. Cesium (http://cesiumjs.org) is an open source, WebGL-based JavaScript library for virtual globes and 3D maps. It is an excellent tool for 3D thematic visualisations, but to use its full functionality it has to be feed with its own file format, CZML. Unfortunately, this format is not yet supported by any major GIS software. This paper intro- duces a plugin for QGIS, developed by the author, which facilitates the creation of CZML file for various types of visualisations. The usability of Cesium is also examined in various hardware/software environments.
Highlights
Visualising data in three dimensions on a virtual globe is a popular field of thematic cartography
The Google Earth plugin provided a simple way to put these KML-based visualisations to the web
Raster overlays can be added as a single image or as tiled image sets, either through a TMS service or in a KMZ file
Summary
Visualising data in three dimensions on a virtual globe is a popular field of thematic cartography. With the emerging new technologies, WebGL and HTML5, several JavaScript-based virtual globe libraries, APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) were developed to facilitate displaying 3D interactive globe models on web pages without the use of any plugins. Such a library is OpenWebGlobe, created by Swiss researchers (Christen, Nebiker, Loesch 2012) or WebGL Earth JavaScript API, which originally was a bachelor thesis (Sloup 2011) and is currently maintained by Klokan Technologies. Once having a virtual globe on our website, various types of thematic visualizations can be added to this globe several ways, depending on the data type/format
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