Designing an interface that supports spatial analyses in Google Earth system

Abstract

This paper describes the construction of interfaces supporting spatial analysis. The designed application uses Google Earth system to calculate defined computations and visualize them on three-dimensional map of the world. Additionally, the functionality of Google Earth is extended by the Google Earth API interface and its equivalent for C# programming language - FC.GEPluginCtrls library.
The resulting system has both the basic features that allow easy visualization and data analysis, but also the set of tools for more advanced geospatial analysis. As an example, it implements a geostatistical data analysis taking into account geospatial distribution.
The presented application enables to conduct geostatistical analysis of seismological data saved in KML format. The data used for testing purposes come from the USGS. Those data contain information about the location of the earthquake sources described by the geographical coordinates. The time of occurrence, depth, and magnitude are the parameters used to conduct typical geostatistical analysis. The analysis enables to calculate the average and directional semivariance.
The construction of the Earthquake interface integrates the three-dimensional visualization together with the geostatistical tools. The presented geostatistical plugin is an example of the tool that can be designed using the Google Earth for visualization of the results for scientific computing. It also shows a possibility to design other applications for geospatial data analysis, and adapts its functionality to the specific application.