With the introduction of terrain imagery applications downloadable over the Internet, there is a desire to leverage these technologies in the world of simulation. Google Inc. s Google Earth is a freely available application that gives the user a view of satellite imagery, 3D terrain, and Geographic Information System (GIS) data from a database over the Internet. The user is able to import customized placemarks, shapes, and images into Google Earth and overlay them on the terrain using Keyhole Markup Language (KML). Combined with the ability to refresh such data over the network when connected to an HTTP server, the user can retrieve the visual data that represents the simulated entities and events. The entities can be represented using any of the objects available in KML, such as icons or COLLAborative Design Activity (COLLADA) models. Finally, Google Earth permits the display of feature data such as roads, rivers, and lakes, which can be exported from existing terrain databases to KML.

This paper presents the results of a prototype development effort which implemented a simulation adapter for the U.S. Army s One Semi-Automated Forces (OneSAF) system. The adapter serves as the Web server and bridge to the simulation for Google Earth to retrieve KML data representing the simulation. In addition, the adapter provides access to the simulation information through a Web browser. The prototype consists of two components. The first serves as a bridge from Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) to KML by running as a separate process. The second is embedded directly into OneSAF as a OneSAF Component, where the amount of data served is limited only by the amount of information that OneSAF can provide to the Component.