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google-earthcesiumjsterrain

looking for a free self-hosted google earth alike service


I need to setup a google earth alike service, which I can self-host the elevation data and map tile data on a VPS such as EC2.

I briefly researched the following resources:

  • Cesium
  • OpenElevation
  • OpenStreatMap
  • Google Elevation API

My questions are, to name a few:

  1. What is the relationship, if any, between these technologies/products. For example, if I try to setup up a "Cesium World Terrain" server, do I still need something like OpenElevation? Or, is Cesium already using OpenElevation as a component?

  2. Does google offer something like "GoogleEarth javascript engine/library", which is free to deploy (as long as you don't use their servers)?

I am not asking to compare these technologies, which maybe controversial or against SO's policy, but just need help to unerstand the relationship between these technologies, and what are the pieces I need.


Solution

  • Google used to provide a system called Google Earth Enterprise, which included data processing and hosting servers, as well as the Google Earth Enterprise client, which is basically Earth Pro with the added ability to switch to an alternate server/database for imagery, terrain and base-layers. The server side of it was open-sourced years ago, and the Enterprise client is still available, so that might be one option.

    Some resources: