FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF THE WEB TOOLS FOR THE CHRONOSTRATIGRAPHY: PALEOSTRAT.COM VERSION 2.0

PaleoStrat is an independent database for chronostratigraphic/stratigraphic information that is also part of the larger CHRONOS system which consists of a number of federated databases. The basic goal of the Paleostrat is to provide the researcher with tools so they can easily: (1) work on the details of the selected section or well; (2) work with multiple sections; (3) be able to interactively select data for export to reports, download, or run through various additional visualization and analytical tools. Just recently Paleostrat version 2.0 has been released with several new features such as: New database schema and improved system security. Development for Paleostrat version 3.0 is underway and many of the tools will utilize the ArcIMS Web-based technology of ESRI. Overall ArcIMS is a powerful, scalable, standards-based tool that lets you quickly design and manage Internet mapping services. However, the key feature of ArcIMS is that it includes an optional component called the ActiveX connector which allows customization through different programming environments such as ASP and enhanced support for the .NET development environment. We will use the ArcIMS technology to construct an Application Programming Interface (API) to support generation of stratigraphic columns via the Web. As a web-based tool, the user is not required to have ESRI software on their computer - rather the program is entirely hosted on the PaleoStrat server. We also anticipate that CHRONOS may take this product and port it to an open-GIS format to insure as wide a distribution of the tool as possible. The interactive stratigraphic column that will be a “live” GIS-based “map”, not a static drawing of a stratigraphic column. Points, lines, and polygons of this “map” will represent all the data associated with a stratigraphic section. All the GIS-type information of the stratigraphic section (and well log) will be hosted in a spatial database. PaleoStrat uses Microsoft’s SQL Server 2000 software along with persistent stored modules to support the systems database functions, but any relational database with a spatial front end is suitable. The project supported by NSF grants EAR 0106796 and EAR-ITR 0218799.