| Abstract |
In geography new measuring techniques and imaging modalities
have led to a huge amount of distributed data requiring new digital
processing techniques. Environmental monitoring programs and
analysis of global change in geography, meteorology, and climatology
require an interdisciplinary usage of knowledge about the ecological
system earth. Until recently the traditional atlas has been the primary
tool for collection and dissemination of geographical knowledge
about the earth. To advance to concepts of the atlas it is necessary
to work on a methodological base di erent from that discussed before
under the slogan digital atlas. The new tools that are developed in this
project will permit an interactive, individual, and problem-related representation,
the combination, modeling, and the interchange of multidimensional
spatial and temporal data sets. A number of theoretical
and practical aspects will be addressed, e.g., the investigation and
interpolation of the space-time-continuum, the interpretation of data
using di erent scales, and the use of subject-specific models for representation
of measured and simulated data. Within the scope of the
project some goals are in the fields of the development of hierarchical
methods for compression, visualization and data access, thus enabling
ecient handling of distributed resources in worldwide data and computer
networks. Another task of the project lies in the development of didactical concepts for digital use of scientific data and models by a
wide class of users. The project is a joint venture of the Institute for
Physical Geography at the University of Freiburg and the Institute of
Computer Science at the University of Leipzig. |