OpenEarth: using Google Earth as outreach for NCK’s data

In 2003 various projects at Deltares and the TU-Delft merged their toolboxes for marine and coastal science and engineering into one toolbox, culminating in 2008 in an open source release, known as OpenEarthTools (OET). OpenEarth adopts the wikipedia approach to growth: web 2.0 crowd sourcing. All users are given full write access to help improve the collection. Quality is assured by version control, tracking all changes. OpenEarth started as a social experiment to investigate whether crowd sourcing was possible in our community of marine and coastal researchers. The answer is yes: over 1000 users registered, now enjoying over 5000 contributions from over 100 contributors. The most important asset is a general toolbox to plot any data type in Google Earth. With this toolbox it has become very easy for marine and coastal experts to disseminate their data via Google Earth. It enables the NCK community to make its data available to end-users and the general public with only little effort. They can now consume our data as simple as watching YouTube: DataTube. In this paper it is shown that OpenEarth has added important value by analyzing a wide range of marine and coastal data types from NCK simultaneously in Google Earth. To match the traditional gap between specialist knowledge and end users, Google Earth is shown to be a very powerful tool. The possibilities for outreach by NCK are manifold.