National atlas metaphor in the access to the GDI

Abstract

A National Geospatial Data Infrastructures (NGDI) coordinates and facilitates sharing mechanism of geospatial information of the nation. The NGDI are often organized according thematic principles, based on the nature of participating organisations that make geospatial data are available. Clearinghouses do offer metadata descriptions of these data. Current interfaces to the NGDI allow searches with the use of locational, attribute, and temporal definitions in searching for a required data. Related to the usability issue, user-interface in the NGDI should provide an easy environment to support the user goal in finding, selecting, and making use of framework and thematic data. Presently, the search results often provide bunches of metadata descriptions that should be examined carefully by the user, while the users tend to have a quick and accurate solution for the submitted keyword. This research suggests using national atlas as the key metaphor to access the NGDI. People are used to pick up an atlas when it comes to find geographical information. The project intends to expand the current functionalities of national web atlases. The atlas will not only have its traditional capability to represent the country, but will also give an access to the data sets behind the map. The atlas maps are the key elements to locate a required geospatial data. Furthermore, as it was applied on the traditional atlases where data providers and experts from different backgrounds in a country are organised to produce a national atlas book, the atlas metaphor can be used as a spatial data organiser. It brings an automatic content updating to the users.

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