UCGIS Virtual Seminar - Fall 1998 [Back][Refresh][Options][Search] Mars [Edit*][Delete*] [Image] The Planet Mars Dawn Wright 10/18/98 [Image] mars Deana Pennington 10/19/98 [Image] [Image] I agree that this site is quite Brian Ward 10/19/98 interesting, and will certa... [Image] More Mars James Nichols 10/19/98 [Image] Re: The Planet Mars Byong-Woon Jun 10/20/98 [Image] Mars Map Erik Shepard 10/21/98 [Image] Post new message in this thread ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 18, 1998 09:10 PM Author: Dawn Wright (dawn@dusk.geo.orst.edu) Subject: The Planet Mars Discuss the NASA Planetary Data System's Mars Explorer http://www-pdsimage.wr.usgs.gov/PDS/public/mapmaker/mapmkr.htm (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2091) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 19, 1998 09:37 AM Author: Deana Pennington (penningtond@geo.orst.edu) Subject: mars I thought this was a pretty cool site! If you select the "expanded version" on the first screen, you get to their new and improved site, where you can select images from Mars, Jupiter, Venus or the moon, and where you have several complexity options. I thought they did a good job providing flexibility. Really liked the merged black and white/color option. On the negative side, as always, image loading was slow, even with the new Mac G3. Too slow to facilitate any real work on this data. I'd go out of my mind if I had to actually try to work on this data, even selecting particular images to download to my local machine. Also, although they provided all of the information by which scale could be calculated for any given image, more than once I wished there was a bar scale for a quick look. Given the technology they had to work with, this is a pretty good site. For the future of distributed computing, we still need to resolve speed issues. Deana (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2103) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 19, 1998 12:11 PM Author: Brian Ward (wardb@terra.geo.orst.edu) I agree that this site is quite interesting, and will certainly become more so as more planets are added to it. I agree with James' observation that it is a bit clunky, but I can deal with that as long as the data are accessible and the interface is fairly easy to navigate through. Deana - "Given the technology they had to work with, this is a pretty good site. For the future of distributed computing, we still need to resolve speed issues." Yes! The Internet as a whole is experiencing such speed issues, and they are being and will continue to be addressed. I suspect that the server machine in this case has a speedy initial connection, but by the time the data travels to the client it gets bogged down by slow or busy machines or the client itself has a slow modem, and the client-end download time can be quite extensive. Certainly in cases such as this where we are dealing with large spatial data sets, this can be quite a hassle. I think that download time is quite important for Online GIS and related things, and it will be important for speed to increase as more and more data are shared across these lines. But meanwhile we'll be content to wait 30 seconds for the next page to come up............... Brian (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2118) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 19, 1998 09:57 AM Author: James Nichols (jnichols@extension.umn.edu) Subject: More Mars I'd agree with Deana that there are some speed issues if you are not on a fast internet connection. On campus here at the U of MN I found the access time acceptable even for the large images (3-6 seconds usually). The piece of the site I was most impressed with was the ability to get more information than just the images, on the advanced site in the help section there is quite a bit of detail on the projections and stretches used, a glossary of terms and most importantly a fair amount of information about the data sets used to generate the images. This information makes the site useable for initial research instead of just for viewing pretty pictures. The site has a slightly "clunky" feel, but I think that these distributed interfaces are useful as they are. I would not want to wait for the interface to become as sophisticated as current stand-alone GISs to examine the data that is currently available. (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2105) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 20, 1998 11:25 AM Author: Byong-Woon Jun (bwjun@arches.uga.edu) Subject: Re: The Planet Mars This site allows us to display an area of Mars at a variety of zoom factors, multiple colors, images sizes and map projections. Basically, this page finds it possible to make clickable or dynamic maps using image map function in HTTP server and MapMaker software. It takes CGI (Common Gateway Interface)-based server-side strategy which focuses on providing map display on demand from a primary or heavy server. Thus, performance is definitely affected by network bandwidth and speed. Nowdays, network bandwidth issue is a bottleneck of distributed computing and Internet. How can we solve this problem? I think there are two solution avaiable. One is high speed network to facilitate the fast communication between server and client. Another is thick client strategy which attempts to shift some of the work of processing requests to the user's computer. However, this strategy has several disadvantages. By the way, does this site employ fully distributed computing? If so, in what aspects? If not so, what do we need to establish distributed computing environment? Jun (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2166) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Top][Previous][Next][Print][Reply][Edit*][Move*][Delete*] Date: October 21, 1998 07:16 AM Author: Erik Shepard (shepard@uga.edu) Subject: Mars Map The mars map was pretty neat, and as pointed out, I especially liked the differing levels of use from casual browser to professional with projections, etc. Speed is definitely an issue as is some of the interface (i.e. it would be nice to be able to "drag" a mapextent or something like that) but the problems stem from the browser-as-virtual-computer not from the designers. Definitely a neat site and a lot of content. (http://forums.library.orst.edu/forums/Index.cfm?CFApp=7&Message_ID=2190)