MOBILE AND WEB-BASED APPLICATIONS FOR GEOSCIENCE FIELD DATA MANAGEMENT

To streamline the work process and improve the work flow on the geoscience field data collection, storage, management, exchange, and visualization, we have designed and developed a system that pairs a mobile app up with a web-based application as a proof-of-concept example. The mobile app is devised for the purpose of collecting field data, which include GPS locations, digital images, and digital notes. These data can later be uploaded to the web-based application for permanent storage and further data manipulation. The web-based application is based on a 3-tiered architecture that consists of a web browser at the front end while a database at the back end and a functional logic server in the middle. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are specifically used to implement the user interface in the front-end tier, the Apache web server runs PHP scripts, and MySQL server is used for the back-end database. Typical data management features such as insertion, deletion, and update are provided. The web system also allows the stored data to be converted into XML format as such they can be shared among different systems in the future. The users may select the stored data and populate them as GML format so that field visualization on Google Earth can be easily achieved.