MyEarth was developed in order to succeed in replacing large archival systems with cumbersome text-only interfaces, moving to the convenience of the desktop environment, where most visualization needs are currently being met.

The figure illustrates the MyEarth Search and Retrieval Tool showing the feature details of an ESRI shapefile for the Mexico region, returned in the spatial query results set. The Polygon ROI, represented by the yellow polygon, is defined for the entire region, whereby executing a Polygon Contains query returns a number of shp files to the Google Earth main window. Each file contains separately selectable features: cities, roads, rivers, lakes, routes and states. The Polygon ROI may be saved for use in future searches.

MyEarth v1.0 currently supports search and retrieval of hdf4 and ESRI shapefile content which may be visualized in a VG environment, e.g. Google Earth. More data types will be added in the future, including NetCDF, hdf5, etc. Versions of MyEarth for PC and Unix are under development, including versions for use on mobile platforms.

The Spatial Search Engine (SSE™) database can hold millions of records, which makes for a fully configurable data archiving system, with the potential to network attach large storage media, e.g. SAN disk technology, or large tape drive facilities to provide extensible mass storage capabilities.

MyEarth allows spatial searches to match a variety of common shapes {linestring, point, MBR, polygon}. In this way, MyEarth™ becomes a fully extensible archive, search and retrieval tool for a wide variety of large 4d datasets that may be visualized in a VG. more