ATLAS2000 – Atlases of the Future in Internet

In geography new measuring techniques and imaging modalities have led to a huge amount of distributed data requiring new digital processing techniques. Environmental monitoring programs and analysis of global change in geography, meteorology, and climatology require an interdisciplinary usage of knowledge about the ecological system earth. Until recently the traditional atlas has been the primary tool for collection and dissemination of geographical knowledge about the earth. To advance to concepts of the atlas it is necessary to work on a methodological base different from that discussed before under the slogan digital atlas. The new tools that are developed in this project will permit an interactive, individual, and problem-related representation, the combination, modeling, and the interchange of multi-dimensional spatial and temporal data sets. A number of theoretical and practical aspects will be addressed, e.g., the investigation and interpolation of the space-time-continuum, the interpretation of data using different scales, and the use of subject-specific models for representation of measured and simulated data. Within the scope of the project some goals are in the fields of the development of hierarchical methods for compression, visualization and data access, thus enabling efficient handling of distributed resources in worldwide data and computer networks. Another task of the project lies in the development of didactical concepts for digital use of scientific data and models by a wide class of users. The project is a joint venture of the Institute for Physical Geography at the University of Freiburg and the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig. Preprint submitted to Elsevier Preprint July 1998 1 The Digital Atlas A New Approach An atlas has always been an important aid for the gathering and dissemination of geographical data. The recent advances in geodata processing has furthered a reorientation in the requirements of digital atlases: • The basic function of an atlas is the production of maps. The distribution of these maps can occur as either hard copies or in digital form as CD-ROM (active distribution) or in the Internet (passive distribution). • The advances in digital image processing provide new possibilities for the digital atlas such as zooming functions and interactive selection of single map layers. Ormeling [3] called an atlas which provides these functions an interactive atlas (in contrast to the usual view only atlas). If such maps are available on Internet they are called a map server. There are many map servers in the Internet, but they always contain one or several drawbacks such as weak cartographic presentation, lack of image processing for the viewer, weak resolution, unknown data sources and so on. • A new challenge for a digital atlas is the inclusion of maps resulting from geoscientific models such as maps from weather forecasts or similar less demanding simulations. These models can be derived numerically (e.g. simulation of wind fields) or statistically (e.g. regionalization of precipitation patterns). They provide data for visualization of complicated processes and spatial interpolation of place-depended time series. • The integration of these models into digital atlases and the dissemination of maps and atlases in the Internet would improve the use of geoscientific knowledge/data in problem oriented spatial analysis for many ecological problems. Unfortunately, there are no map servers with adequate models in the Internet. Thus, the main goal of ATLAS2000 is the investigation of various models with regard to their potential for interactive usage and their application for data sets from a provided data base or even for data created by the user. In analogy to the map server a concept integrating interactive maps with various models is called a Model server. The model server in ATLAS2000 will contain numerical models, which may need considerable computing power, to simulate specific meteorological phenomena and regionalization models, which require considerable expert knowledge. ATLAS2000 offers its own climatological database and several spatial data sets of the Upper Rhine Valley. These data sets can be used as an introduction to the basic functions of the digital atlas and provide examples for the user. The user can then apply the various models for a comprehensive climatological analysis of the Upper Rhine Valley.