Mission | People | Organization | Research | Education | Project | Data | Tools | Links
Distributed Geospatial Information Computing and Visualization
Project Leader: Dr. Chaowei (Phil) Yang, CEOSR
Distributed Computing and Visualization of Geospatial Information
Building a Geographic Information Service Center Using GeoMedia
A Movie of GeoServNet 1.0 developed by a team led by Phil in UofC(180Mb)
Zipped Movie File (83.6Mb)
Distributed Computing and Visualization of Geospatial Information
Objective
This research and development project is trying to research and develop a geospatial information distributed computation and visualization platform for the analysis and dissemination of the data and services, which have been or will be collected / generated in the big project of Virginia Access, to the general public in Commonwealth of Virginia and Mid-Atlantic Area as a whole.
Background and Approach:
The dazzling development of GIS in recent years has lifted GIS from the views of system to a media of communicating geographic information to the audience in all kinds of communities (Daniel Z.Sui, and Michael F.Goodchild, 2001). Lots of data management and service providing systems have been developed to provide this media function of GIS to public. E.g., Mapquest has been built to provide millions of route maps for public (http://www.mapquest.com/). TerraServer was built to sell remote sensing imagery to the general public (http://www.terraserver.com/). They have been successfully used for serving public, but most of them they only support one simple service to the public or worked as one simple channel as media, MapQuest is focused on the route selection and place location, while TerraServer is focused on the image management and dissemination to the public. With the urgent need for combining different data resource and services together to provide a comprehensive media function. We need to research and construct a mechanism which will be able to support integrated geographic information and services to the public. And this could be achieved and requested with the development of Virginia Access by building a Web Harbor (Chaowei Yang, 2000) shown in following picture (Fig.1).
Through the construction of this web harbor, we built a distributed platform to disseminate geospatial information to the public in Virginia and Mid-Atlantic Area to benefit their everyday life (Fig.2) and based on this distributed platform, we can integrated all kinds of remote sensing, GIS, regional data and information products together to provide a comprehensive service for providing knowledgeable information for different agencies in this area.
The distributed computing and visualization of geospatial information will also take global Earth Science geographic information data provided by NASA, NOAA, USGS and other providers and, where applicable, create regional, state and local examples for user evaluation (Fig.3 and Fig.4).
And concentrate on building an enabling infrastructure for data downloads, collaborative exchanges and information application production.
Technical framework:
As shown in Fig.5, the Yellow modules will be R&D to serve as 2 functions, coordinate the interaction between different computing and visualization services, and to serving as analysis method or application model to provide the functions and services which were identified in Virginia Access. The pink modules were software from companies which will be used for data management and web mapping. The blue ones were the data and information we collected through Virginia Access.
The server side will provide the data, information and service through company software and our R&D computing/coordinating modules, the client side will serve as the visualization and interaction module with customer.
Milestones:
4th Quarter, 2002: Finish the Web Harbor of Virginia Access and related function module development and integrated module development.
1st Quarter, 2003: Construct 2 geographic information services and provide them to the public of the Commonwealth of Virginia
2nd Quarter, 2003: Develop a platform for 3D data visualization through Web
3rd Quarter, 2003: Prototyping a system software for 4D data visualization through Web
References:
Bo Huang, Bin Jiang, and Hui Lin, 2001, An integration of GIS, virtual reality and the Internet for Visualization, analysis and exploration of spatial data, International Journal of Geographic Information Science, 15, 439-456
Center for Earth Observing and Space Research, 2001, Virginia Access Annual Report, George Mason University, 1-2
Chaowei Yang, 2000, Theory, Techniques and Implementation Methods of WebGIS, Unpublished Ph.D dissertation (Beijing: Peking University)
Daniel Z.Sui, and Michael F.Goodchild, 2001, GIS as a media? International Journal of Geographic Information Science, 15, 387-390
Building a Geographic Information Service Center by Using GeoMedia Products
Objective
This proposal plans to research and develop a Geographic Information Service Center for support of research as well as organization, management and dissemination of CEOSR data and services, which have been or will be collected / generated in projects such as Virginia Access, serving the Commonwealth of Virginia and Mid-Atlantic region users.
Problem and Approach
The accelerating development of GIS in recent years has lifted GIS from views of systems to a media for communicating geographic information to audiences from different communities (Sui and Goodchild, 2001). Data management and service-providing systems have been developed to provide this GIS media function to the public. For example, Mapquest was built to provide route maps for user navigation (http://www.mapquest.com/); TerraServer was built to sell remote sensing imagery to the general public (http://www.terraserver.com/). They have been successfully used, but most support only one simple service or task as one simple channel: MapQuest is focused on the route selection and place location, while TerraServer is focused on image management and dissemination to the public. With the urgent need for combining different data resources and services together to provide a comprehensive system serving different users, we need to research and construct a mechanism which will provide integrated geographic information and services for our users. This will be accomplished through projects such as Virginia Access and will be achieved by using GeoMedia products and further R&D.
Virginia Access (CEOSR, 2002; Kafatos et at, 2002), headed by the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research, George Mason University, is a project supported by NASA Earth Science Applications Program. It brings eight institutions in Virginia and one in Maryland together to focus on Mid-Atlantic region for enhancing geographic information science research and education. It will ultimately benefit this region through applications utilizing remote sensing, GIS, regional data and information products as well as develop information technology requirements for Virginia Access infrastructure that help to satisfy the user community needs.
Virginia Access will utilize geographic information data provided by State, NASA, NOAA, USGS, and other providers to create regional, state and local prototypes for user evaluation. It will concentrate on building infrastructure for data download, collaborative exchanges and information application production. During the past year, we have developed methods for analyzing the geographic information for providing services to satisfy some state and local agencies. To make these services available to all users in Virginia, Maryland, and the Mid-Atlantic region, we need to build a distributed system to distribute the service; i.e., we need to build a geographic information service center to disseminate the data, information and services.
GeoMedia (http://www.intergraph.com/gis/), as its name implies, is aiming to build a Geographic Information Media Platform to transfer geographic information and services to the public. Its product family has produced an ideal basis to provide relevant software to build a Geographic Information Service Center: GeoMedia and GeoMedia Professional could be used as the information integrator, serve as a visualization/analysis tool, and as an open platform for collecting and managing spatial data using spatial databases. SMMS for GeoMedia and the GeoConnect Geodata Management Server could be used as a system for managing and publishing the data/information and related metadata.
GeoMedia WebMap and GeoMedia WebMap Professional provide a good platform for disseminating information and for developing interface for the user, and for integrating R&D methods or modules to help with the implementation of services to the public through the Internet.
By combining the methods and information which we have collected/developed to date by using GeoMedia products, it will form a large showcase of GeoMedia products in Virginia, Maryland, and the Mid-Atlantic region, as well as a valuable addition to the academic world of Geographic Information Science.
Technical framework
The physical network for Geographic Information Service Center of Virginia Access will support a virtual center which includes a variety of servers, desktops, mobile devices and related geographic information service consumer devices distributed in the Commonwealth of Virginia, connected with wireless or cable network (Yang C., 2000 ), as illustrated in Fig.1.
As shown in Fig.1. The system will be based on both a location and server distributed computing strategy (Li, B., 2000; Yang, C. 2000); the yellow modules will be developed to serve two functions: 1) to coordinate the interaction between GeoMedia products and R&D modules, and 2) to serve as the analysis method or application model to provide the function or service which we have identified for different applications. The pink modules are software modules from GeoMedia which will be used for data management and web mapping. The blue modules are the data and information that CEOSR is collecting through its various projects.
The server side will provide the data, information and service through GeoMedia software and our R&D modules. The client side will serve as the visualization and interaction module for the users.
Milestones
4th Quarter, 2002: Construct a theoretical mechanism through which to implement a location distributed virtual center; prototype the technical mechanism to an integrating platform by using GeoMedia Products.
1st Quarter, 2003: Select and develop some geographic information service modules according to the requirement of user interest and the specification of the integrating platform.
2nd Quarter, 2003: Integrate the geographic information service modules with the integrating platform through GeoMedia Products and provide it to the users of Virginia, Maryland, and Mid-Atlantic region.
3rd Quarter, 2003: Expand the platform to a geographic information service center by integrating users’ feedback and write a journal and technical papers.
References
CEOSR, 2002, Virginia Access Annual Report, George Mason University, 1-2
Kafatos Menas et al, 2002, SPIE
Li, B., 2000, “A component perspective on geographic information services,” Cartography and geographic information sciences, 27, 75-86
Sui D. Z., and Goodchild M. F., 2001, GIS as a media? International Journal of Geographic Information Science, 15, 387-390
Yang C., 2000, Theory, Techniques and Implementation Methods of WebGIS, Unpublished Ph.D dissertation (Beijing: Peking University)
VAccess-MAGIC © 2001-2002. All rights reserved
