Real Time GIS Data Tool, GeoData Web Editor

Yichum Xie

This technology is an open source GIS data tool. GIS provides a mechanism for management, analysis, and display of geographic knowledge, which is represented using a series of information sets such as maps and globes, geographic data sets, processing and work flow models, data models, and metadata. This technology utilizes an existing platform technology from ESRI Inc., ArcIMS. The ArcIMS platform technology is a server-based product that provides a scalable framework for distributing GIS services and data over the Web. The tool provides Web publishing capability for GIS maps, data, and metadata for access by users inside and outside an organization. ArcIMS enables Web sites to offer GIS data, interactive maps, metadata catalogs, and focused GIS applications. The GeoData function allows a real time editor application to be used for mapping and visualizing changes in location. The technology is similar to MapQuest, but differs in that it interprets street anomalies more accurately and further inputs those changes automatically into the information center responsible for data tracking (in Michigan, as an example, it is the Michigan Information System).

Web Enabled Urban Planning Teaching Tool Called Web Polis

Norman Tyler

Web Polis is an interactive tool developed to encourage and facilitate community participation through an online portal. This technology provides a direct link for local communities through an open information sharing environment. Web Polis offers a suite of applications including online discussion forums, newsletters, consensus builders, real estate analysis, a mapping/GIS component for spatial analysis, and community online survey prototypes with integral statistical analyses. The targeted users of the tool include city officials, economic development groups, the educational community (to teach politics and city government), and urban planning groups.

GIS Software Development for Optimization of Web Map Services

Bin Li

This work is focused on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology that enables the research team to collate and analyze information from diverse data sets very rapidly. This GIS integrating technology draws upon and extends existing techniques. Other areas of interest include Cartography, GeoComputation, and Economic Geography.

Language and Location: A Map Annotation Project

Helen Aristar-Dry

Unlike objects such as vases or pieces of jewelry, languages move primarily when a group of people speaking them migrates and settles in a new area. Thus, information about language boundaries and language relationships can provide critical insights into the migrations, interactions, cultures, and genetics of populations. However, such insights can only be realized in a system that melds language information with information from the physical and social sciences. The most effective way to do this is through a Geographical Information System (GIS), which can flexibly organize a wide range of heterogeneous data, presenting the assembled information according to the topography of geographical regions. This allows language data to be integrated with geographical, political, demographic, zoological, botanical and archaeological data in ways which are immediately visually interpretable. The LL-MAP project will build a database of linguistic information which is integrated into such a geographically-based system and is made freely available through Internet-based tools. These will allow users to generate customized maps showing the relationships between language and diverse kinds of non-linguistic data. They will also allow researchers to add annotations to map-oriented data, and to discuss the relationships the system manifests. In this way LL-MAP will encourage collaboration between linguists, historians, archaeologists, ethnographers and geneticists, as they explore the relationships between language and cultural adaptation and change. The integrated data approach embodied in LL-MAP will thus promote innovative research methods, and these in turn may lead to new insights into the prehistoric relationships among human populations.

Weather Trackers for Inquiry-Based Learning

Mark Francek

To provide undergraduates with stronger inquiry-based field experiences involving hypothesis testing and data collection, this project will revise existing curricula to include weather data gathering projects using 80 hand-held weather trackers, instruments that have cable hookups permitting the easy transfer of weather data to computer files for statistical manipulation. Faculty from geography/earth science, biology, and engineering departments are using the weather trackers in a variety of introductory and advanced classes. Students are exploring spatial and temporal variations of weather variables in classrooms, on campus grounds, at local forests, and at local elementary and middle schools, where pre-service teachers taking these courses regularly work with K-8 students. Examples of specific projects include students measuring temperature and dew point variations within buildings, testing for the existence of an urban heat island, and correlating changes in barometric pressure with associated changes in wind speed and air moisture. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the promotion of an inquiry-based approach for learning about weather in series of existing science courses in earth science, biology, and engineering. Non-majors, pre-service teachers, and K-8 students are collecting and analyzing their own field data. Students who might ordinarily not gain such abilities learn technical and analytical skills that are useful in the workplace, a significant broader impact. With the needs of pre-service teachers in mind, the project's inquiry based approaches are aligned with state and national science standards.

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