Development of an Earth environmental digital library system for soil and land-atmospheric data

Recently, as interest in the Earth environment increases, research on a digital library system for environmental data such as remote sensing data is getting more popular. However, no existing system is sufficient for practical use in the field of Earth environmental research because of the wide variety of data and poor user interface systems. We propose and examine new methods for automatic data loading and a flexible user interface system with many features such as 3D visualization. We implement the Earth environmental digital library and operate it on the Web. This method can load 1100 kinds of Earth environmental data from 30000 files into the digital library almost automatically. Although the system is focused on limited users like Earth environmental researchers, more than 8000 hits per month describe the practical usefulness of it. The distribution of the contents of accessed data shows the demand for various kinds of those data.