297 Earth Anatomy Revealed: Geologic Mapping for Our Future

Wednesday, 25 October 2017
8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Ballroom 6A

FLYOVER COUNTRY USES A WEALTH OF GEOINFORMATICS RESOURCES TO PUT GEOSCIENCE DATA IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

Paper number: 297-18
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 10:34 AM – 10:44 AM

Authors

Abstract

Community efforts, including NSF’s EarthCube initiative, are continually enhancing geologic databases and their coupled application programming interfaces (APIs), supporting the development of mobile and web applications that display and allow interaction with spatial geologic data, including maps. Flexible community tools and resources developed with common standards can be reused again and again by multiple developers and researchers, adding value to publicly funded data. These “long-tail” data, small quantities of information collected by many people in many places, are collected in specialist databases curated by domain experts, and gain additional power when further aggregated into a spatial visualization platform. The popular mobile application Flyover Country® relies on these developments and efforts to query for and display data from a wide variety of geologic resources, making those data easily accessible to the interested public, as well as to professionals. Digital maps and data visualization on GPS-enabled devices allow users to see themselves in context with an annotated landscape, and to understand multiple datasets in relationship to one another. For researchers this technology, along with offline functionality, enables new methods of data discovery and use in the field. For the general public it means effortless access to decades of NSF-funded research results, and to on-demand location-based information at the moment of inspiration by the natural world, such as when looking out the window of an airplane or visiting a National Park. For educators, students, and armchair geoscientists, this use of technology supports place-based education and spatial discovery of nearby data, field trip guides, and points of interest.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 49, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2017AM-308335

© Copyright 2017 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author(s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copies for noncommercial purposes advancing science and education, including classroom use, providing all reproductions include the complete content shown here, including the author information. All other forms of reproduction and/or transmittal are prohibited without written permission from GSA Copyright Permissions.