The Virtual Community of Digital City based on Google Earth

Digital City (DC) is one of the most important researches of Digital Earth. The whole Digital City is actually a digital community for citizens. In order to improve the efficiency, convenience and reality of communication between people in Digital City, we propose the Community of Public Communication (CPC) Based on Google Earth. The digital community consists of Virtual Reality Movements & Communication Engine (VRMCE) and Geo-referenced News Search Engine (GNSE). VRMCE enable people to move like in the real world and communicate with each other easily and instantly. Our system is based on Google Earth API GEPlug-in which could embed the Google Earth into web page. In this way, users can visit and employ the CPC conveniently. At the same time, in order to support the instant communication among users, we build the Instant Communication System (ICS) into VRMCE. People in CPC can walk along the street and talk with somebody who is just walking by. However, this is not adequate for CPC. Because the target of CPC is built into public communication community whose information does not only comes from users of CPC, but also come from huge amounts of information of web pages. Traditional web search engine is mostly topic-referenced. Nevertheless, what we propose in this paper is geo-referenced search engine which is more suitable to CPC. In others words, users are able to obtain the latest news happening around. The GNSE takes charge of searching the geography position of the users or the news relative by analyzing a great deal of information of web pages. In this paper, the efficiency of CPC has also been demonstrated in this paper.