Center for Earth Observation The Center for Earth Observation at North Carolina State University is a multi-disciplinary research and training center concerned with geospatial sciences. The faculty and staff are associated with the College of Natural Resources.

Current Projects

Web Mapping Applications [North East Regions Park Service Example]

Geospatial databases present challenges for providing thin-client distributed access to and visualization of these massive datasets. Web-based mapping applications provide an excellent solution to this problem, allowing users to explore and process geospatial data using streamlined interfaces. Applications include mapping and processing US Northeastern regional trail systems data for the National Park Service.

Curriculum Development [GIS at NCSU]

NCSU is developing a Distance Education program in Geographic Information Science and Technology for a Graduate Certificate and a Non-Thesis Master's of Science. Proposed course topics include Introduction to GIScience, Geospatial Databases, Remote Sensing, Geospatial Analysis and Visualization, Web services. Both the traditional and the distance education program curriculum is currently being revised.

Pyschophysical Evaluation of Nonphotorealistic Visualizations [More]

Research in human visual cognition suggests that beautiful images can engage the visual system, encouraging it to linger in certain locations in an image and absorb subtle details. By developing aesthetically pleasing visualizations of data, we aim to engage viewers and promote prolonged inspection, which can lead to new discoveries within the data. We present three new visualization techniques that apply painterly rendering styles to vary interpretational complexity (IC), indication and detail (ID), and visual complexity (VC), image properties that are important to aesthetics. Knowledge of human visual perception and psychophysical models of aesthetics provide the theoretical basis for our designs. Computational geometry and nonphotorealistic algorithms are used to preprocess the data and render the visualizations. We demonstrate the techniques with visualizations of real weather and supernova data.

Aesthetic Visualization Engagement Study [More]

Do aesthetically appealing visualization engage viewers? Does aesthetic appeal help users to retain information about the visualization? Studies are being conducted in collaboration with the North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science and the University of British Columbia Department of Psychology

Recent Courses Taught

Recent Projects

Unified Modeling Language Park Service Trail Data Model

The UML model of a our NPS data provided a database model to describe the internal schema of the database, depicting data tables, columns of those tables, and the relationships between the tables. UML, Universal Modeling Language, is schema for modelling database that provides a set of expressions agreed upon by the scientific community (ergo, “Universal”) to communicate models of objects. Originally developed for software design, UML class diagrams are now popular for database modeling, because they enforce consistency and also because UML diagramming software can export the conceptual database model to a physical database model.

National Park Service Custom Virtual Computing Lab Applications

North Carolina State University's Virtual Computing Lab (VCL) has been an excellent tool in our effort to provide distributed access to geospatial data without requiring local software installation. Developing and posting customized interfaces on the VCL allows remote users with specialized domain expertise to analyze complex mapping datasets and facilitate decision making.

Agenda

1. algorithm design (flowcharts, pseudocode)
   
2. simple programming syntax
       using variables
       string manipulation
       calling functions and passing arguments
   
3. passing arguments into scripts
   
4. calling a custom model from script
   
5. control statements
      branching
      looping (while and for)
   
6. debugging
   
7. defining and calling functions
   
8. data structures
      lists
      dictionaries
   
9. calling modules
   
10. selected geoprocessing object functionality (list, cursors)
    
11. useful operating system commands
    
12. file i/o
    
13. using a custom script in a model
       checking condition
       branching
    
14. calling a script from VBA
    
    

1. How to publish map resources on the web.
   
2. How to add query tasks to a map website.
   
3. How to add geoprocessing tools to a map website.
   
4. How to add geoprocessing tool layers to a map website.