DATA | INTERFACE | COMPUTATION

All digital projects need data and a means to manipulate that data. GIS as both a hard- and soft-ware interface has many, many proprietary formats and new interfaces can even be developed independently using existing software tools.

The biggest difference between spatial applications is the manner in which data, software, and hardware are organized. Some for-profit groups keep everything in a big, expensive, but powerful and consistently supported package. Other projects piggyback on either proprietary data or software; suplementing it with components from the public domain. Still other projects utilize both data and software publicly available from large providers/ aggregators and adapt them to specific purposes.

The fragmented nature of contemporary GIS tools and cultures present either serious obstacles or rich oppoprtunities to integrate a comprehensive sense of natural relationships into our developing technology. These case studies are intended to outline the development and distribution of geo-locational mapping technology online. They are not exhaustive critiques of particular projects of methods.

The U.S. Geological Survey is the only public institution with a mandate to collect and distribute reliable scientific information about the earth. Its resources include mineral, hydrological, atmospheric, and seismic datasets. Paper and single file versions of the data have been and will continue to be available.

The fragmentation of online GIS tools is no more apprent than in the federal government. Within the many divisions, mulptiple IMS (Internet Map Server) applications have been created of which Seamless (Seamless Data Distribution System, Earth Resources Observation and Science - EROS) is the most comprehenseive, informative, and slow. The quality of the data here is very high as are the sizes of the files.

This is the best source for environmental data in the US. Our perceptions of nature are the sole reason for the data and online tools to exist. All information is treated in a direct and scientific manner. Few assumptions are apparent regarding the value of any natural process over another. Human activity typically remains divorced from "natural" processes in these maps.

One can compare these maps to any others they may have as the datasets can be downloaded in multiple formats for wider access and use. This provides extensive oportunities for analysis by scientists and laymen alike to consider quantifiably accurate data in decidedly non-scientific contexts.

*Note* the National Atlas is another excellent place to look for environmental data. It covers agriculture to national border security to annual precipitation to global warming trends. it suffers a bit however from a confusing web layout and lack of central access to all available map data. As for redundancy, try to compare this to the National Map sometime. Just go to Geodata.gov -your "Geospatial-One-Stop" (which is, incidently, part of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure which is the main project of the Federal Geographic Data Committee whose primary goal is to reduce data reundancy in federal agencies!) EPA information may or may not be included in any of these sites, but as of 2006, EPA GIS data can be found consistently at Geodata.gov.

academic research, scientific research, agriculture, architecture, real-estate development, military, education, planning, sports & recreation, insurance, disaster prevention, disaster response, etc.

cumbersome, fragmented, seperated from human actions in the environment,