Global Origins: A Tool for Connecting Museum Objects to Geography
Rob Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
Charles Moad, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA
The advent of online mapping and the increased access to satellite imaging has sparked the development of several interesting tools for interacting with these high resolution images and datasets directly from our desktops. Mashups using maps from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and many others have become popular ways to look at a variety of information from housing to police reports and online dating. Can we use these tools to communicate about museum objects and their relationship to geography? Global Origins or G.O. is a tool built on top of a 3D mapping system from NASA called WorldWind. G.O. is designed as a presentation platform for museum objects that can display narration and imagery in a geographic context provided by WorldWind. Designed originally to support art museums, G.O. can be extended to support any type of museum object by authoring a simple XML document. In this demonstration we will show the Global Origins tool and two different sets of museum objects. We will also describe it's use at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and how it can be easily extended to support new types of objects as well.
Demonstration: Demonstrations - 1 [Close-Up]
Keywords: Software, Interactive, Geography, Education, Technology
