INTERNET-BASED VISUALIZATION AND COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES FOR EARTH SCIENCE DECISION-MAKING

Society demands that earth- and environmental-resource issues be evaluated and addressed by interdisciplinary investigators from the scientific, engineering, planning, and regulatory communities. Often these investigators are required to interact with a larger community of public stakeholders. These investigators, also, by necessity, develop databases and models derived from disparate data sets that are often large, complex, and vary dramatically in scale and quality.

Two critical technological innovations have occurred to assist participants engaged in these societal decision-making exercises: (1) second-generation internet, or Web 2.0, technologies found in web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking, wikis, web-logs, social bookmarking, and RSS) have become a commonplace means of facilitating communication between online groups, and (2) traditional 2D GIS has given rise to client- and web-based, 2D and 3D visualization systems (including Google Earth and Google Maps). These scientific visualization and collaboration tools are the essential information-technology building blocks of web-based and client-based tools and services supporting on-line collaboration, community discussion, and broad public dissemination of earth and environmental science information in a wide-area distributed network.

The visualization tools and collaborative processes are components of a more comprehensive, modular “Internet-based Earth-Systems Monitoring, Analysis, and Management Platform”. The other modules of this tool are being developed over time in an opportunistic manner as key research needs develop. The other key modules facilitate Earth-system Monitoring, Analysis and Modeling, and Decision Management capabilities that provide the essential business processes of a broader and more complex Earth-system Investigations Enterprise.

These tools and services are being used to facilitate investigations and conversations of scientists, resource managers, and citizen-stakeholders addressing water resource sustainability issues in the desert southwestern United States. These ongoing water-resource sustainability projects serve as use cases for the further development of this information-technology infrastructure.