BUILD APPS!

The same tools that allow scientists to extract and analyze large swaths of geoscience data also make those data available for use in mobile and desktop applications for discovery, visualization, and manipulation. This presentation will highlight the use of geoinformatics infrastructure for use in building the Flyover Country mobile app for geoscience, as well as show several other examples of applications that are based on similar tools. The ability to find, visualize, and interact with large amounts of data is changing the way geoscientists can discover and use data, and providing new opportunities for public engagement and education. Access to data on mobile devices allows users to bring data into the field with them, allowing real-time decisions to be made using the available data, and providing context for new measurements as they are taken. Databases that allow for complex spatial (polygonal) queries provide efficient loading and saving of only the data relevant to a particular field area, keeping data footprint and processing to a minimum, a requirement for working on mobile devices. The consistent metadata fields enforced by geoscience repositories allow connections between data from multiple sources to be made. This can be useful for both public outreach (e.g., linking to a Wikipedia article about a particular fossil site) and research (e.g., coupling measurements between separate datasets). The efforts of the geoinformatics community have created a large opportunity for furthering the reach and insight geoscience data can provide through the predominantly untapped avenue of building apps.