Visualization System for Earth Environmental Data Base

The earth’s environmental problems have attracted serious attention worldwide. Various kinds of environmental data, such as remote sensing data, have become available for examining. Although this data is crucial to understanding such problems, there has become an over-abundance in variety of size, format, and filetype which makes it difficult for researchers to handle. We feel that earth environmental researchers should not be burdened by such cumbersome tasks. Therefore, we are developing a digital library for earth environmental information and a VRML based data visualization system for it. Even now, content-based image retrieval systems have many problems attributed to the degree of difficulty in implementing them. Thus, we are trying to visualize this data so that researchers can utilize it more efficiently, effectively, and easily. A great advantage for VRML users is that people can see environmental data from any perspective above the earth and with any resolution easily. Also by using MPEG-movie, users can observe the changes of data drawn from time series files.