Developing a Virtual Atlas on the World Wide Web

Shaun Ashdowne, Masters Candidate, Department of Land Information, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V Melbourne, Vic, 3001, Australia. Phone +613 9660 1706 Fax: +613 9660 2761 E-mail: shaun@srl.rmit.edu.au | Web Page: Virtual Atlas

Liddy Nevile, Director, Sunrise Research Laboratory, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V Melbourne, Vic, 3001, Australia. Phone +613 9660 3024 Fax: +613 9660 2761 E-mail: liddy@rmit.edu.au

William Cartwright, Department of Land Information, RMIT, GPO Box 2476V Melbourne, Vic, 3001, Australia. Phone +613 660 2423 Fax: +613 663 2517. Email: w.cartwright@rmit.edu.au

Keywords: WorldWideWeb, Atlas, maps, spatial information, search

Introduction

This Poster describes, as work in progress, the development and production of a 'virtual atlas' on the World Wide Web.

Summary of Project

The project involves the investigation and development of a lexicon to facilitate the assembly of a 'virtual atlas', which is composed by accessing spatial information resources on the Internet. A lexicon is the vocabulary and structure of a particular language, in this case the language for accessing spatial information using the World Wide Web. The development of this lexicon will provide the basis on which users can build a virtual atlas. The enabling process will involve providing an interface on the World Wide Web where users can locate pertinent spatial information and construct their own virtual atlas.

A 'Virtual atlas' is a collection of pointers to spatial information. A virtual atlas will support the user by providing the various modes of interaction for the location of spatial information.

Many organisations are providing spatial information on the Internet, "publishing" to a world audience. As the growth of Internet publishing increases, locating specific information becomes more difficult. Existing utilities to help a user locate information are not particularly helpful when looking for spatial information, particularly for naive users.

Research needs to be undertaken to discover what naive, intermediate and expert users do and report on their difficulties in accessing spatially related information.

Objectives of this program are to:

Problems being investigated:

The Virtual Atlas

The 'Virtual Atlas' project aims to bring together, for the user, spatial information from diverse resources available on the Internet. The first stage of the project was to locate spatial information resources for every country and presenting this to the user via a simple interface.

The collation process involved locating Web, Gopher, FTP and Telnet addresses that possessed quality spatial information. The methods used to locate the spatial information resources were:

The user interface has three implementations:

The Virtual Atlas web site:

Point-and-click

The 'point-and-click' interface to the Atlas allows the user to navigate by clicking through the various levels: Continent - Country - State. Client side image maps have been used for their advantages of:

This speeds up page navigation and instils confidence in the user. Navigation can then take place with the user knowing where they are going instead of being shown a set of co-ordinates, which gives the user no direct feedback.

Text Version

To enable users that are on a slow link, using a browser that does not support client side image maps, or using a text based browser such as lynx, there is a text version of the Atlas.

The Next Stage: Predefined Searches

The next stage of the Atlas is the construction of predefined searches for users to locate area-specific information. These searches will enable the user to locate information without requiring the knowledge of appropriate keywords. The query will be sent directly to one of the existing Internet search engines, most likely AltaVista, and the results presented for the user by AltaVista.

Another proposal is to be able to provide a search on more than one search engine at the same time and present the results on the Virtual Atlas page, instead of going to the search engines own page.
In combination with this method would be the possibility to extract basic information from the user as to the type of content they are seeking, using a forms based user interface.

I seek feedback on the proposal of these options available to me, and perhaps others I have missed. Implementation strategies in this area are important. Any advice on this more technically difficult area would be most welcome.

References:

Ashdowne, S., Cartwright, W.E. and Nevile, L., 1995, "Designing a Virtual Atlas on the World Wide Web", WWW proceedings of AusWeb95, Ballina, NSW, Australia.

AltaVista- http://altavista.digital.com/
Department of Land information- http://www.srl.rmit.edu.au/landinfo/
Infoseek- http://www.infoseek.com/
Lycos- http://www.lycos.com/
RMIT- http://www.rmit.edu.au/
Sunrise Research Laboratory- http://www.srl.rmit.edu.au/
Virtual Atlas- http://www.srl.rmit.edu.au/va/
Webcrawler- http://www.webcrawler.com/

Copyright

Shaun Ashdowne, Liddy Nevile © 1996. The authors assign to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM, and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the author.
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