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Hello, Since both Collect Earth desktop and collect earth online are available, i am kind of confused about which one i should use. it will be really helpful if some one can provide one short document (or note in bullet form) to describe the difference between them. thanks, Jinkai |
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Dear Jinkai, Collect Earth and Collect Earth Online are at this moment complementary products. Collect Earth Online is young product that we are working on and its vision is to allow for web-based data collection through augmented visual interpretation. It aims to allow for easier crowd-sourced data-collection and to make the process of setting up a survey easier, as it does not require to design the survey and the sampling in a different tool; the data collection interface, survey design and analysis tool are centralized in an online system. Collect Earth is a tool that is currently mature and allows for data collection for a single user from his/her computer or for a team of interpreters though a manual process of data aggregation (or if possible through a centralized PostgreSQL database). Being mature means that it currently supports operations that have been identified as necessary over the years of data-collection experience and that currently are ported into Collect Earth Online. Collect Earth is an integrator of different products: Google Earth historical VHR imagery and interface for the data-collection, Google Earth Engine (with a browser) for the remote sensing / temporal support and Saiku for the data analysis. With Collect Earth Online the idea is that these features are centralized in a single web-based tool. So, in the short-future Collect Earth Online will be the tool that we will mostly use for the data collection, unless there are some limitations that force the use of Collect Earth (e.g. access to historical Google Earth imagery or cloud-data limitations). When Collect Earth Online reaches maturity, it will allow to load older CEP files and will mimic the current Collect Earth functionalities. As it is now, you can definitely use it for simpler projects that do not require complex data structures, validation or calculated-attributes. Hope this answers the question. We will post a follow-up answer once the rest of the functionalities are introduced to CEO. |
