A 3D visualization and management framework for geological disaster monitoring and early warning based on virtual globes

The virtual globe-based 3D visualization is a unique opportunity to facilitate the user interface of geological disaster monitoring and early warning system by promoting intuitive 3D interaction and seamless integration of 3D visualization with spatially referenced and multi-scale data. This paper discusses the technical issues of developing a virtual globe-based 3D visualization and management framework for geological disaster monitoring and early warning, using Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to support multi-source and multi-scale data interoperability. With the service oriented architecture´s capability for integrating distributed resources, spatial information such as DEM, remote sensing image, geography, geology and others information is deployed as different services in one server or several geographically distributed servers on the Internet (Intranet). Geological disaster monitoring data, which is spatially referenced and multi-source data with additional temporal information, come from different databases, files or service such as Web Service, FTP, and Email and so on. A service based integration method is used to integrated multi-source monitoring data to a series of unified service that can be visualized in virtual globes. Other information such as text, graph, image and video also can be integrated into the system easily with this architecture. Geological disaster early warning tools based on monitoring data and spatial information are integrated and the results can be visualized in virtual globes, which can help day-to-day users and high-level decision makers perform professional analysis, understand the complex analytical results by a well-designed 3D visualization and interactive user interface. Auxiliary spatial analysis tools such as 3D distance measurement, slope calculation, filling and cutting analysis, terrain section analysis are also integrated to help end users perform geological disaster early warning.