Thinking about location and its relationship to so many aspects of life and thought benefits from a wide variety of tools. Several virtual globe geobrowsers have been developed including Google Earth, the NASA community's open source World Wind, Microsoft's Virtual Earth and ESRI's freely and publically available ArcGIS Explorer (Windows only). ESRI's ArcExplorer uses the rectangular map design so is not a virtual globe but wisely uses the Java programming language to make it cross-platform for both Mactinosh, Windows, Linux and other computer operating systems.
The virtual globe tool, ArcGIS Explorer, still feels like beta virtual globe software, but it holds out longer term promise for deeper connections into the rest of the GIS features for thinking based on location. In part this promise is because the parent company that produced it, ESRI, wants awareness of and then sales of its premier commericial GIS applications. It also it is because ESRI has specialized in GIS (Geographic Information System) software and therefore has a deep understanding and strong motivation for explaining what else GIS software can do.
These reviews analyze older versions of ArcGIS Explorer, but their comments still have relevance to much of the current version of the product: ArcGIS Explorer - the review (Thursday, December 28, 2006) and Time Line: Google vs ArcGIS Explorer (Monday, October 29, 2007), by author Rich Treves.
News and updates for ArcGIS Explorer can be found at Zerg's Rumble and ESRI's blog site for ArcGIS Explorer.
Page author: Bob Houghton |
Original published 1-28-09