RIAs and OGC Web Services Based Geospatial Data Searching and Visualization

Large amounts of valuable geosciences data have been collected due to the advances in digital earth technology. How to provide an efficient way through which researchers can easily retrieve desired data to facilitate data analysis and system modeling poses great challenges to the geosciences community. This paper presents a Geo-web services based system aimed to enhance geospatial data searching and visualization. The system provides an interoperable way of searching and accessing high quality geospatial data from multi-source and multi-discipline geographic data repositories through the use of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web services. It is in conformity with OGC Catalog Service for the Web (CSW) specification to play a "directory" role that permits the registry, discovery and access of geospatial information resources distributing on the Internet. Moreover, by leveraging the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) technologies, the system enables to seamlessly assemble multiple heterogeneous data from different sources into one single user interface for visualization. Two investigations were made to demonstrate how this system has been used to improve the efficiency of searching and collecting geospatial data for a particular research.