This award for a Small Grant for Exploratory Research is intended to develop a novel front end that can be used with existing web-based GIS. The team will use commercial off-the-shelf software manufactured by the Skyline Software Corp, called TerraExplorer. Using this software, one can combine imagery and elevation data of various resolutions anywhere in the globe, fully control navigation over the globe in 3D, and query any internal or external databases that are in one of many standard formats (eg, ArcSDE, Oracle, delimited text files.). TerraExplorer combines the look and feel of a video game with the power of modern GIS analysis tools in an easy-to-use true interactive 3D application. These ease-of-use and video-game qualities will contribute to the success of other developments in Arctic GIS, as the former facilitates the creation of a robust tool and the latter encourages recurrent use. Content will be added to a prototype terrabase, called EarthSLOT (Earth Science, Logistics, and Outreach Terrabase).
