BUILDING THE DIGITAL EARTH

The Cornell University's Geoscience Information System Project is a major research initiative to develop a comprehensive Information System for the geosciences. The initiative arose from the general acceptance that existing information systems and knowledge extraction techniques are inadequate for the geoscience challenges of the 21st century. In order to handle the changing needs of the geoscience community that is striving to understand the Earth's complex system composed of myriad interrelated mechanisms, drastic changes in both approaches and strategy are needed. The ways geoscientists approach solving the Earth System Science problems require a new look. This is essential if we are to succeed in utilizing interdisciplinary studies in the geosciences. Building a Geoscience Information System is one of the most important steps that geoscientists could undertake to make the most use of new technological advancements. The potential of having all information and knowledge along with access, modeling, and visualization tools under the finger tips of a user represents a power that has rarely been tapped. Currently our efforts at Cornell University continue in two major areas: Data collection for a digital geoscience library, and developing easy-to-use tools to manipulate, access, manage, analyze, map, and study the collected data sets. Internet based data access mechanisms and web-mapping tools developed at Cornell allow everyone easy access to our geoscience digital library data sets (http://atlas.geo.cornell.edu/). An advanced Java applet provides user-defined access to large data sets in the underlying library. The applet provides dynamic mapping tools, data analysis and selection tools, and the ability to incorporate point, line, and polygon data sets, as well as tools like the Profile Maker, which is used to extract profiles and cross sections between two arbitrary points on Earth.