Interactive 3d models and animations for understanding earth’s coordinate systems

This work presents datasets that can be used for getting a good understanding of an essential geoscience content knowledge that describe earth’s coordinate systems. This include coordinate system used for spherical/spheroidal earth with latitudes and longitudes and their subsequent transformations to 2d maps on a variety of media (paper as well as digital) using the process of map projections. The datasets include PDF documents that are embedded with 3d models, animations and mathematical equations. The dataset has separate PDF documents for geographic (for spherical earth) and projected (2d) coordinate systems. Additionally, the data set include individual 3d models that can be used in various digital systems (including apps) and the animations in mp4 format that can be watched on most of the modern digital devices.Format of the data: 3D models (.u3d) - 34 files (9.5MB); 3D models (.pdf) - 34 files (11.7MB); PDFs - 8 files (49.6MB); Movies (.mp4) - 24 files (182MB)Methods used for creating 3d models and animations was published in the following publication: Srivastava, S. (2014). Techniques for developing resources to understand geographic and projected coordinate systems. Journal of Spatial Science, 59(1), 167-176.Please cite this record using the following DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4227/39/5a77c1220483a