ATLAS2000—Atlases of the future on the Internet

Abstract

In geography new measuring techniques and imaging modalities have led to a huge amount of distributed data requiring new digital processing techniques. Environmental monitoring programs and analysis of global change in geography, meteorology, and climatology require an interdisciplinary usage of knowledge about the ecological system earth. Until recently the traditional atlas has been the primary tool for collection and dissemination of geographical knowledge about the earth. To advance the concepts of the atlas it is necessary to work on a methodological base different from that discussed before under the slogan digital atlas. The new tools that are developed in this project will permit an interactive, individual, and problem-related representation, the combination, modeling, and the interchange of multi-dimensional spatial and temporal data sets. A number of theoretical and practical aspects will be addressed, e.g., the investigation and interpolation of the space-time-continuum, the interpretation of data using different scales, and the use of subject-specific models for representation of measured and simulated data. Within the scope of the project some goals are in the fields of the development of hierarchical methods for compression, visualization and data access, thus enabling efficient handling of distributed resources in worldwide data and computer networks. Another task of the project lies in the development of didactical concepts for digital use of scientific data and models by a wide class of users. The project is a joint venture of the Institute for Physical Geography at the University of Freiburg and the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig.