Abstract submitted for the 12th International Conference on Interactive Information Processing Systems for Meteorology, Oceanography and Hydrology, Atlanta, Georgia Abstract submitted for the 12th International Conference on Interactive Information Processing Systems for Meteorology, Oceanography and Hydrology, Atlanta, Georgia

HORIZON: A Digital Library Project for Earth and Space Data Serving the Public

R. Wilhelmson, M. Folk, M. Ramamurthy, B. Shatz, M. Yeager, D. Crutcher, and M. Winslett)

NCSA is a major contributor in the application of technology not only through the development of Mosaic but also through the development of the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) now being used in the EOS project. Extensions of these activities are being prototyped in the HORIZON digital library project funded by NASA that is focused on large remotely sensed databases. The goal of this project is to develop easy to use, scalable digital library technologies for the public to locate, integrate, move, and analyze remotely-sensed earth and space science data via the Internet. Activities integrate and leverage off of existing research, development, and discipline-specific activities at NCSA, and the University of Illinois Departments of Astronomy, Atmospheric Sciences, Computer Science, and Library and Information Science. Many of these activities are centered around WWW (World Wide Web) technology, especially NCSA Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPD server. Efforts are directed at software enhancements on the client and server sides. Research and development areas include efficient access to large data sets, scalable server technologies, and next-generation information systems. Finally, there are two WWW testbed servers, one for Earth (The Daily Planet(TM)) and one for space science data, provide working real world applications to thoroughly test and demonstrate this technology. The project URL is http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/horizon/ , The Daily Planet(TM) URL is http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/ , and the Space Science URL is http://www.atmos.uiuc.edu/horizon/about/space.html .

One activity of special interest to the atmospheric science community users is the development of the Interactive Image Markup Language that provides advanced WWW image capability, supporting interactive maps with visible and invisible layers as well as a variety of multimedia and recompositing functions triggered by clicking on different image regions defined by the user (this is further explained in the IIML Abstract). This will be accomplished by the Common Client Interface Library developed at NCSA, which provides two-way links between NCSA Mosaic and external applications. Also of direct interest to the atmospheric community is the HDF file browser which also handles browsing of a subset of netCDF files as well as tables, attributes, and text. Finally, efforts in subsampling of large data sets and organization of data for efficient access are directly relevant.

Corresponding Author:

Robert Wilhelmson
Department of Atmospheric Sciences and National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
105 S. Gregory Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801
Tel: (217) 333-2046
Fax: (217) 244-4393
e-mail: bw@ncsa.uiuc.edu