World Wind

Open Source. Its the new way of doing business in the Internet age, and World Wind is happy to be part of the action. But developing for World Wind is not only for hard core coders. Its add-on and plug-in architecture provide opportunities for almost anyone to add data and functionality to the application.

World Wind is a uniquely powerful data visualization environment that allows for massive amounts of data to be visualized within the context of the Earth, or any other planetary body. This extrordinary capability gives users the ability to see a planetary body holistically, with layers of data provided on an as needed bases.

Recognizing that a small handful of people could not possibly develop such a dynamic application alone, the World Wind development team has embraced the open source community and has made the source code for World Wind available for anyone to enhance and extend.

World Wind is developed in C# using Microsoft's .NET framework, which integrates support for a number of open standards, including WMS and XML. In addition, World Wind's 3D graphics engine is powered by Microsoft's DirectX and supports a range of video cards for enhanced graphics performance.

While developing a software application generally requires solid knowledge of a software development language such as C#, Java or Objective C, World Wind breaks new ground by allowing anyone to contribute data sets to the application.

The vision for World Wind has always been to not only put vast amounts of information at the fingertips of users, but to give users the ability to contribute their own content to World Wind. With this in mind, World Wind was designed to support an add-on architecture that allows for the rapdid addition of new information into the system.

Adding data to World Wind is a two step process, creating the data set itself and then updating an .xml configuration file to reference the data. A series of tutorials are available that provide step-by-step instructions for adding a host of addition information to World Wind, including place names, boundaries, landmarks, and national flags, just to name a few.

World Wind's plug-in architecture provides a way to expand the capabilities of World Wind without having to edit or modify the source code. This can be extremely advantagous if someone wants to quickly add a new capability to World Wind, such as estimating the distance between two locations, or providing GPS information.

Developing plug-ins are a little more complex than simply adding on new data sets, and require some programming. To support this effort, there is additional documentation and tutorials available.