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Marble (software)

Marble is a virtual globe application which allows the user to choose among the Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars and other planets to display as a 3-D model. It is free software under the terms of the GNU LGPL, developed by KDE for use on personal computers and smart phones. It is written in C++ and uses Qt. Marble is intended to be very flexible; beyond its cross-platform design, the core components can easily be integrated into other programs. It is designed to run without the need for hardware acceleration, but it can be extended to use OpenGL. An important user-experience objective being that the application start fairly quickly, it ships with a minimal but useful off-line dataset (5–10MB ). Contributors have added support for on-line mapping sources such as OpenStreetMap and the ability to interpret KML files. Marble also provides route planning capabilities. A navigation mode called MarbleToGo was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010. It was later partially rewritten and renamed to Marble Touch. Geothek is a fork of Marble adding a statistics module, pixel maps, and a 3D view. It is developed and used by Austrian publisher as atlas software for classrooms.

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Article summary

Marble is a virtual globe application which allows the user to choose among the Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars and other planets to display as a 3-D model. It is free software under the terms of the GNU LGPL, developed by KDE for use on personal computers and smart phones. It is written in C++ and uses Qt. Marble is intended to be very flexible; beyond its cross-platform design, the core components can easily be integrated into other programs. It is designed to run without the need for hardware acceleration, but it can be extended to use OpenGL. An important user-experience objective being that the application start fairly quickly, it ships with a minimal but useful off-line dataset (5–10MB ). Contributors have added support for on-line mapping sources such as OpenStreetMap and the ability to interpret KML files. Marble also provides route planning capabilities. A navigation mode called MarbleToGo was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010. It was later partially rewritten and renamed to Marble Touch. Geothek is a fork of Marble adding a statistics module, pixel maps, and a 3D view. It is developed and used by Austrian publisher as atlas software for classrooms.

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  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  3. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

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