WholeEarthWiki

A WholeEarthWiki mediated by asynchronously networked user-producers offers an opportunity to develop a comprehensive, navigable, self-maintaining three-dimensional world atlas and encyclopedia. An encyclopedic open-source whole-earth atlas would be an autodidactic virtual reality.

A navigable three-dimensional whole-earth terrain map is available under a current GNU license. Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) provides a public protocol for exchange of 3D models. Open source encyclopedias are developing comprehensive descriptive text in most of the world’s major languages. Open source culture is refining approaches for managing development of protocols, software and content.

Current network technology is sufficient to produce a streaming 3D atlas that hosts navigable encyclopedic information. Though the technology is available, it has not been assembled as an encyclopedic virtual atlas nor have navigational and cataloguing protocols been published to facilitate such an interactive network endeavor.

Elements

Elements of a prototypical world-wide database of textual, visual, audio and physical information might include:

Content

Virtual commons

Database

List key

The above list suggests how content of a multi-media virtual atlas environment might emerge. Following recent open-source neural networking patterns, discussion of diverse elements of a multi-faceted atlas might emerge around both sequential and parallel development of various elements. This list can be directed to articles about the related topic by altering the list, by directing links within the article to existing related articles or by creating related appropriately titled articles from subjects on the list.

This list may provide a useful tool for cataloguing emerging elements of a open, public world-wide encyclopedia and atlas, with links to organized articles and discussion about sources and formats.

In a review of proposals for development of Wikipedia, the most active category of proposals was for navigation aids, with quick access to consolidated and condensed information. Navigational approaches developed for public text databases may become the footpaths for visio-spatial navigation methods in a virtual atlas.

A world terrain map might offer selectable levels of detail to budget database access. Navigation can be both directionally within the world, toward greater levels of detail and across time to access scenes reconstructed from earlier periods. At a minimum level of detail, a terrain map might offer a background environment for desktop vehicle simulator software, with autogenerated scenery based on available land use data.

Navigation of the database might be by text entry, by menu selection or by keyboard-controlled movement within the virtual environment. Encyclopedia users who browse text articles could access related models that can be manipulated or that could be portals to virtual environments related to encyclopedic text.

Anatomical texts, for example, might develop linkages into comprehensive anatomical models that can be navigated by location and by level of detail. As the public 3D models develop, more comprehensive models will likely offer greater levels of detail, both for worlds and for objects within the world. Microscopic models might be available by virtual dissection. Animated and morphological models can explain function.

Such models are already in use in corporate and mass media environments. Public domain efforts to develop encyclopedic collections of 3D models might provide the basis for rapid development of virtual worlds related to a range of biological, geographic and engineering subjects.

Visual navigation of a virtual atlas encyclopedia might include virtual museums that can be selectively activated in the landscape. Such virtual museums are already used to display rare artifacts. With reliable public management of encyclopedic models, academies and philanthropists might sponsor projects that contribute to a permanent public knowledge bank. Private efforts might develop commercial environments from the GNU library. Museums might use the GNU atlas libraries as the backdrop for historical reenactments in worlds populated by animated 3D figurines.

Technology

Early technological developments in a virtual commons have included editorial and database software, along with human network skills useful for synthesizing content. Developments now are focusing on adminstration, capacity and navigational aids. Attention to validation, graphic presentation, organization, depth and breadth are likely candidates to drive a next stage of technological development among collective virtual libraries.

Graphic navigational interface technologies might first appear as externally offered modules to assist encyclopedia users. With a leading market share, the encyclopedia might be appealing to commercial ventures that offer enhancements, such as models or environments explained or navigated by stable versions of the GNU document. Commercial development might in turn drive development of publicly licensed virtual interfaces.

Some of the basic elements of a virtual reality encyclopedia may begin to appear among current open-source encyclopedias. A progression from two-dimensional images to two-dimensional animated images to 3D objects that can be manipulated or animated would seem likely if open source encyclopedias follow the trend of commercial electronic encyclopedias developed since the birth of personal computer technology.

Utilities for 3D modeling are available as freeware and are widely used along with commercial interfaces to produce models for 3D gaming environments. Sophistication of visual and audio content can be expected to follow developments in computer processor size and to build on the work of first-generation encyclopedia user-producer collectivities.

Whole-earth terrain data is available under a current GNU release and likely as public information from an official source. Other public information such as road locations, utility information and land use information is available from states and from localities. It is available as public records and increasingly is available in GIS formats that may easily be converted to interface with other protocols.

Public information laws often require access to such information, but technology and public processes have not kept pace by producing a means for governments to provide to the public information produced at public expense. A lack of data conversion technology limits transfer of some information. Official ambivilance toward release of large quantities of official data might also delay development of efficient interfaces.

A public, open-source navigable terrain map available on the Internet would attract interest from current users of maps offered for consumer navigation and of those marketed for commercial flight simulators. A freely available mapped geographic database might become the backbone of new consumer software and internet environments, including map services and flight simulators.

Administration

Administrative approaches for managing an open source world encyclopedia have centered around collectivities that perform as neural network. The approaches have focused on soft security and appeals to the public interest to provide discipline and direction. The efforts are producing sweat equity for future world encyclopedias by securing vast tracts of knowledge into the public domain.

An encyclopedic virtual world atlas is within the scope of current technology, but open public collectivities loosely organized around a learning process have only begun to explore directions for application of networked computer technology to assist human knowledge. As open collectivities create loose neural networks, opportunities lie ahead to organize real-time functions that involve both specialized software for massively parallel synchronous communicative integration, and applications that make the virtual reality more coherent to immediate reality.

The first step to the latter would seem to be integration of live cameras into regional or local scale virtual environments. The first steps to the former might be seen in the Internet itself, in recent uses of Internet in political activities and in the use of massively paralleled Internet collectivities to review data from the YETI project.

The implications of a comprehensible virtual reality whose coherence with immediate reality is eclipsed by a fabricated world suggests fearsome scenarios from science fiction, in which the community or the machines take on a life of their own, or become tools for a malicious manipulator. Such fearsome potentials offer advice for those organizing autodidactic networks, and perhaps a reason not to pursue such endeavors. But the availability of technology to produce such a world, and the trend among humans to use available technology to create salient educational experiences suggests development of more engrossing virtual worlds might be inevitable. The egalitarian tendencies of some humans might force those educational worlds into the public domain.

Outside resources

AlphaWorld - a large-scale, tiered virtual world now available on-line
FlightGear - an open source flight simulator