FLYOVER COUNTRY USES A WEALTH OF GEOINFORMATICS RESOURCES TO PUT GEOSCIENCE DATA IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

Community efforts, including NSF’s EarthCube initiative, are continually enhancing geologic databases and their coupled application programming interfaces (APIs), supporting the development of mobile and web applications that display and allow interaction with spatial geologic data, including maps. Flexible community tools and resources developed with common standards can be reused again and again by multiple developers and researchers, adding value to publicly funded data. These “long-tail” data, small quantities of information collected by many people in many places, are collected in specialist databases curated by domain experts, and gain additional power when further aggregated into a spatial visualization platform. The popular mobile application Flyover Country® relies on these developments and efforts to query for and display data from a wide variety of geologic resources, making those data easily accessible to the interested public, as well as to professionals. Digital maps and data visualization on GPS-enabled devices allow users to see themselves in context with an annotated landscape, and to understand multiple datasets in relationship to one another. For researchers this technology, along with offline functionality, enables new methods of data discovery and use in the field. For the general public it means effortless access to decades of NSF-funded research results, and to on-demand location-based information at the moment of inspiration by the natural world, such as when looking out the window of an airplane or visiting a National Park. For educators, students, and armchair geoscientists, this use of technology supports place-based education and spatial discovery of nearby data, field trip guides, and points of interest.