Connecting People, Data and Resources — Distributed Geovisualization

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights the way Distributed Geovisualization—connecting people, data and resources—can deliver real benefit to science and society. The discussion is framed around a scenario of environmental crisis management—a flood emergency—which is typical of the challenges that only a distributed approach can solve in an effective and timely manner. A real world problem of flood management is considered and it is shown that a distributed approach can lead to more effective crisis management. This is also typical of many others scenarios such as the management of forest fires, oil slicks, radiation leaks, and toxic chemical release. In all of these cases, a combined force of data, resources, and people, at very short notice and on a global scale, is required to be harnessed. Geovisualization is being presented with unique challenges as spatio-temporal decision- making applications require capabilities for extracting and using relevant subsets of data from heterogeneous distributed data resources. The users in the emergency management application, the river or water resources authority, the highways authority and the civic authorities will require access to relevant subsets of their operational databases. In the context of the flood emergency, the spatial dimension will be extremely relevant to enable users to specify the data to be extracted from the river and road networks and the information about land use that refers to the region at risk.