09-11, 10:30–11:00 (America/Chicago), Grand F
NASA GIBS and Worldview enable easy browsing of over 1000 free and open Earth science geospatial data products from NASA and its partners. This talk will highlight the usage, open source software, and future direction of GIBS and Worldview.
Since 2012, NASA’s Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) has served billions of image tiles to users around the world, enabling fast and responsive browsing of thousands of Earth science data products to support science, disaster response, and education. Many of these visualized products are available within hours of being acquired as well as for entire satellite missions which can span decades. GIBS imagery has been the backbone of everything from popular NASA websites such as Worldview and Eyes on the Earth to independent open source projects covering a variety of disciplines. Its ability to integrate with GIS applications such as QGIS and ArcGIS have made it popular among GIS professionals. Both Worldview (the open-source web client for viewing GIBS imagery) and OnEarth (the open-source tiled image server of GIBS) have been adapted by others in the community to create their own services as well.
In this presentation, we will provide an overview of GIBS and Worldview usage, explore their implementation, highlight some recent developments, and detail our current and future development objectives.
First, we will give a brief history of GIBS and Worldview and discuss how they fit in with the rest of NASA’s Earth Science Division and its open data initiatives. We will then highlight how GIBS and Worldview have been used in open source projects, research, and more.
Next, we will discuss usage of GIBS and Worldview in more depth, briefly demonstrating their capabilities and how they can be used by the open source community. Following this demonstration, we will give an overview of the architectures of both GIBS and Worldview, highlighting the free and open source OnEarth tiled image server that is developed and maintained by the GIBS team. We will explain why we initially developed OnEarth and its uniqueness over alternative solutions. This includes an explanation of its primary data format, MRF, and why we use it. We will highlight how other projects at both NASA and other institutions have stood up their own instances of the OnEarth server and Worldview.
Finally, we will discuss the future of GIBS and Worldview. This section will cover our efforts to develop a dynamic data-to-image pipeline, a prototype data tile service using LERC tiles for client-side rendering, 3D data visualization demos, and prototype AI integrations for detecting the presence of natural hazards (e.g. volcanic eruptions) and quickly locating relevant GIBS/Worldview imagery based on user-written prompts.
We look forward to answering questions about the architecture, usage, and direction of GIBS and Worldview. We are interested in hearing feedback from attendees about what new services and features they would find most valuable for their own use cases.
