The spatial glaciological data infrastructure

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Substantial and rapid environmental changes require developing methods which could be able to manage huge information flows, to optimize processes of the data acquisition, storage, analysis, and exchange. Such facilities can be provided by the newly developed GIS technologies. Digital data bases are used as the key component of the GIS methods. We present the system of glaciological data management, developed in the Institute of Geography of Russian Academy of Sciences (IGRAS). Digital Atlas «Snow and Ice on the Earth», glacier inventories and digital library are the basic structures making possible objective presentation of the glaciological knowledge and data. The system provides the data integration, access to the data base, and makes possible using the GIS techniques for analysis. Data integration technologies are designed to form the united information space of subject areas of the spatial data. The objects of integration in our study are the information resources of glaciology, accumulated in a distributed system of data on the IGRAS web servers and geoportals in forms of data and metadata bases, structured (in a particular format) data files, object data files (plain text, documents, images, etc.), and electronic atlases. The best option for formation of a large-scale distributed environment, integration of many information resources of glaciology is to provide the so-called interoperability of data. This refers to compliance with certain rules or usage of additional software tools that allows interaction between various spatial data. These are standards to which the integrated information resources of glaciology should satisfy. The result of integration of the glaciological data technology application is the series of software and technology solutions. The main result of this work is creation of geoportals «Electronic Earth» (www.webgeo.ru), «The Nature and Resources of the Russian North» (www.north.webgeo.ru), «IPY-IGRAS» (www.mpg.igras.ru), all based on the spatial glaciological data. Another result is the digital and web-atlas «Snow and Ice of the Earth», presenting the example of open source of the spatial data on glaciology in the multi-program environment. Regional data bases created for regions of the Caucasus and the Antarctic Continent make it possible to develop various GIS models and to analyze interrelations, status and dynamics of glaciological parameters. The system of links provides easy access to distributed resources.