Management of raster data and their dynamic visualization within the ROCEEH-ROAD System
Michael Maerker, Volker Hochschild
Abstract In the recent past data base systems providing information on early humans and their environment are becoming more and more important and increase rapidly in number. The main aim of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities project entitled “The role of culture in early human expansions (ROCEEH)" is to assess the spreading "out of Africa" in a spatial, cultural and biological context. Implicitly we suppose as working hypothesis that the influence of changing environmental conditions decreased as the importance of cultural and technological innovations grew. The ROCEEH project deals with a variety of variables and formats from geology, geomorphology, palaeontology and archaeology in vector, raster as well as text formats. To achieve the general objectives a georelational spatial information system was developed and implemented. The system is called “The ROCEEH Out of Africa Database (ROAD)”. In this paper we focus especially on raster data and their dynamic visualization in order to assess landscape evolution. The ROAD georelational database was designed as flexible as possible to store manipulate and visualize geographic spatial data. Therefore open source software based on the OGC standards was implemented. Moreover, we provide several web map and web processing services based on a backbone structure with a specific raster data management. The latter allow the visualization of dynamic features in landscape evolution such as topography changes or sea level changes. The acceptance of a database related to early human expansion studies depend very much on the capabilities to explore and visualize the data and to results in a dynamic way. Thus, different levels of interaction must be provided with the system in order to fulfill the manifold user requests.
