Modeling Multi-dimensional Dynamic Data to Describe Ocean Environment

Principal Investigator: Dr. Fang Chaoyang

Start Date:	2006/12/20
End Date:	2007/12/31
Type of Grant:	Direct Grant 2006-2007

Ocean is not only mankind's living space and treasure trove of resources, but the national defense outpost of many coastal countries as well and virtually plays the most significant role in economic, political and military development. The measurement and analysis of the marine environment is fundamental to the management, research and development of ocean. The amount of ocean environment data collected has seen a rapid increasing with development of data collecting technology, which especially includes the advent of satellite remote sensing. GIS acts as tools to gather, manage, analysis and visualize these data, and are now growingly applied to the marine field. However, the traditional commercial GIS may have problems and remain in its contributions. These problems are mainly rooted in the unsuitability between the data model of traditional GIS with multi-dimensionality dynamic nature of ocean environment. Therefore, a spatial-temporal data model which can model the multi-dimensional dynamic data of ocean environment and support analysis and visualization function of these data becomes a necessity for the development of an effectively marine GIS system. This research is aimed at developing a Marine Spatio-Temporal Data Model (MSTDM) based on generalization of the spatio-temporal distribute pattern of ocean environment data, include in situ data and satellite remote sensing data. The model is expected not only to be used to describe the multi-dimensional dynamic ocean environment, but also to support particular analysis and visualization functions used in the oceanography community.