Web-based terrain and vector maps visualization for Wenchuan earthquake

This paper presents a Web-based three-dimensional Geographic Information System (3DGIS) for Wenchuan earthquake disaster assessment. With the help of information technology resources, geoscientists are in a position to learn more about the structure of the earthquake in efficient ways. Due to huge spatial datasets of Wenchuan, China and narrow network bandwidth, general-purpose applications are difficult to transmit and visualize these datasets on the network. The application aims to interactively represent and transfer large spatial objects of Wenchuan County, China, as well as for dynamically rendering them in networking environments. Level-of-detail (LOD) terrain models and vector maps are created, and the server–client architecture is presented. The application provides an effective way for powerful access and manipulation of large-scale Wenchuan datasets.