PROGRAM: P-27
Title:
DAGIK EARTH: AN EDUCATION AND PUBLIC OUTREACH ACTIVITY USING OPEN DATA SETS OF EARTH AND PLANETARY SCIENCES2National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 4-2-1, Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8795, Japan
Abstract:
Dagik Earth is an education and public outreach activity to enjoy the scientific outputs on the Earth and planets with three-dimensional digital globe in classrooms, science museums and home. The three-dimensional presentation system is easy to use and low-cost with a standard PC with Windows or Mac, and a standard PC projector. The software is provided by Dagik Earth project with free of charge for education and scientific usages. The Dagik Earth application is available for iOS devices. More than ten science museums use it as a regular exhibition. It is also frequently used in science and school festivals. Any white spheres, such as balloons, balance balls, and lamp shades, can be used as a spherical screen. The users improvise the system using their own equipment according to the purpose and environment of the exhibition. The system of Dagik Earth used at an exhibition in the National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo was shown in Figure 1. This exhibition was held in a science fair, “Museum for teachers”. A 2m balloon was used as the spherical screen. The contents of Dagik Earth cover wide field of science. The number of contents of Dagik Earth is more than 150. They are categorized into five fields, “Atmosphere/Ocean”, “Earth’s surface/interior”, Planets/Moons”, “Geo-space”, and “Misc.”. Most of them were developed using the open data sets of Earth and planetary sciences. The data was obtained from the databases of the open data, and visualized in equirectangular projection format for the Dagik Earth software. The descriptions of the data and the database are displayed in the caption on the screen. It intends to lead the Dagik Earth users who are interested in the data to the databases for their own intensive usage of the data sets. Dagik Earth is used in various purposes, and the various types of data is used for the Dagik Earth contents. Dagik Earth gets benefit from the open data policy of various data sets, including WDS data. We think that it is successful if the community of the data users and providers of Dagik Earth can connect the science data to the public. The home page of Dagik Earth is http://earth.dagik.org/english. Some of the contents can be displayed on Web browsers from http://dagik.org/dow/index-english.html.
Acknowledgements:
The development of Dagik Earth was supported by grants by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan, and educational programs using Dagik Earth are developed with support by HAKUHO FOUNDATION.
References:
Saito, A., T. Tsugawa, H. Ichikawa, T. Shimada, (2016) Development of Dagik Earth to utilize digital globe for various purposes, Journal of Space Science Informatics Japan, 6, 129-142, doi: 10.20637/JAXA-RR-16-007/0012