Building upon the Current Capabilities of WWT
From the post:
WWT to GitHub
WorldWide Telescope is a complex system that supports a wide variety of research, education and outreach activities. By late 2015, the Windows and HTML5/JavaScript code needed to run WWT will be available in a public (Open Source) GitHub repository. As code moves through the Open Sourcing process during 2015, the OpenWWT web site (www.openwwt.org) will offer updated details appropriate for a technical audience, and contact links for additional information.
Leveraging and Extending WorldWide Telescope
The open WorldWide Telescope codebase will provide new ways of leveraging and extending WWT functionality in the future. WWT is already friendly to data and reuse thanks to its extant software development kits, and its ability to import data through both the user interface and “WTML” (WWT’s XML based description language to add data into WWT). The short listing below gives some examples of how data can be accessed, displayed, and explained using WWT as it presently is. Most of these capabilities are demonstrated quickly in the “What Can WorldWide Telescope Do for Me?” video at tinyurl.com/wwt-for-me. The www.worldwidetelescope.org/Developers/ site offers resources useful to developers, and details beyond those offered below.
Creating Tours
What you can do: You can create a variety of tours with WWT. The tour-authoring interface allows tour creators to guide tour viewers through the Universe by positioning a virtual camera in various slides, and WWT animates the between-slide transitions automatically. Tour creators can also add their own images, data, text, music, voice over and other media to enhance the message. Buttons, images and other elements can link to other Tours, ultimately allowing tour viewers to control their own paths. Tour functionality can be used to create Kiosks, menu-driven multimedia content, presentations, training and quizzing interactives and self-service data exploration. In addition to their educational value, tours can be particularly useful in collaborative research projects, where researchers can narrate and/or annotate various views of data. Tour files are typically small enough to be exchanged easily by email or cloud services. Tours that follow a linear storyline can also be output to high quality video frames for professional quality video production at any resolution desired. Tours can also be hosted in a website to create interactive web content.
Skills Required: WWT tours are one of the most powerful aspects of WWT, and creating them doesn’t require any programing skills. You should know what story you want to tell and understand presentation and layout skills. If you can make a PowerPoint presentation then you should be able to make a WWT tour. The WorldWide Telescope Ambassadors (outreach-focused) website provides a good sample of Tours, at wwtambassadors.org/tours, and a good tour to experience to see the largest number of tour features in use all at once is “John Huchra’s Universe,” at wwtambassadors.org/john-huchras-universe. A sample tour-based kiosk is online at edukiosks.harvard.edu. A video showing a sample research tour (meant for communication with collaborators) is at tinyurl.com/morenessies.
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That is just a sample of the news from the WorldWide Telescope!
The popular press keeps bleating about “big data.” Some of which will be useful, some of which will not. But imagine a future when data from all scientific experiments supported by the government are streamed online at the time of acquisition. It won’t be just “big data” but rather “data that makes a difference.” As the decades of data accumulates, synthetic analysis can be performed on all the available data, not just the snippet that you were able to collect.
Hopefully even private experiments will be required to contribute their data as well. Facts are facts and not subject to ownership. Private entities could produce products subject to patents but knowledge itself should be patent free.