Development and prospects of Re:Earth, an open source GIS web app using Cesium
2021-09-29, 11:30–12:00, Puerto Iguazú

This year we released Re:Earth, our no-code web GIS tool that uses Cesium under the hood, to the OSS community.
Re:Earth's aim is not to rewrite the wheel, but rather to harness the power of the 3D globe and allow absolutely anyone to visualize and share their geospatial data. Users are able to import preexisting data and build projects off of that, or start from scratch and then easily publish the project or export the data in a variety of supported formats. All without the need of an engineering team.

The Re:Earth team is currently recruiting OSS committers and plug-in developers to help expand Re:Earth's potential and build a digital earth community of users and developers.


The Re:Earth project grew from the idea of, "What would be possible if anyone, anywhere could access the digital Earth's potential?". To make this a reality, we knew Re:Earth needed to be no-code, but more than that we needed to make sure hardware or OS requirements wouldn't get in the way either, so that is why it is a fully web-based application. We also knew projects as well as data would need to be shareable so we have both project publishing and data exporting. Publishing a project is easy and gives users the chance to opt-in or out of SEO, change their URL and setup publishing to their own domain. Exporting data is easy and supports many of the most common file formats seen in GIS.
Our hope has always been to open Re:Earth up to the OSS community and build a global community around it and what it stands for. The first step to making this happen was Resium, a popular OSS package that allows developers to use Cesium with React. With Resium we have been able to write Re:Earth's codebase with React and Typescript on the front end. As the main backend language we chose Go. By using these modern languages we have kept Re:Earth highly maintainable and scalable and hope that other developers will find contributing to it easy.
Beyond the code, we have already begun our global community with the core Re:Earth team coming from around the globe. We especially want to help lift talented people up from areas of the world with less opportunities locally, and that is why we have been focusing on finding talent in Syria. At the very least, we hope this project can bring some hope to the people around the world facing difficult times and let them know that there are opportunities out there.


Authors and Affiliations

Hidemichi Baba
Kyle Waite
Hiroki Inoue
Kenya Tamura

Track

Software

Topic

Data visualization: spatial analysis, manipulation and visualization

Level

1 - Principiants. No required specific knowledge is needed.

Language of the Presentation

English

I am a web engineer, and I aim to promote WebGIS through the power of the OSS community to create a world where everyone can easily access GIS.