Integrated geoscience databanks for interactive analysis and visualization

There has been a worldwide revolution in geoscientific data availability and access. An effectively infinite and instantaneous free access to geoscientific data from the World Wide System of Geoscience Data Centers and Virtual Observatories is available. In addition, national databanks and commercially available large exploration data-sets also exist. These distributed data resources impose challenges for the future to move toward their objective integration and visualization to discover new knowledge. Such advancements can facilitate meaningful interpretations and decision-making for the benefit of society at global and local scales. This article presents the Digital Earth initiative at a national level to address multiple domains, such as effective management of natural resources, interactive planning of exploration activities and monitoring, mapping and mitigation of natural hazards. It discusses a distributed geospatial data infrastructure and its importance in geoscientific data integration for efficient and interactive data retrieval, analysis and visualization. Some examples are presented to demonstrate the advantages of integrated visualization in geoscientific analysis.

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