Location: Japan

Software

• Japan has an large amount of online material about geospatial data, including a large and active community of professionals and hobbyists using it, but there is not much mutual knowledge with the rest of the world, presumably because of the language barrier.
• For example, there are terrain visualization applications like Kashmir and MAPCUBE which are largely unknown outside Japan.

Data

• There is a Japanese DEM format (.mem) used only by the main agency to distribute their data, Geographical Survey Institute whose products are not free and cannot be ordered online.

Places

• Virtual Kyoto is a project of Ritsumeikan University.
  • Although it is Windows-only and IE-only, the paging and detail is very impressive.
  • Aerials for the whole city, extruded footprints for most buildings, and nice models for a few landmarks and a few downtown streets and bridges
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  • It uses something called UrbanViewer for Web which is an ActiveX control for content generated by MAPCUBE.
• Older Japanese buildings such as Kyoto Machia present an interesting challenge to parametric building representation.