Geoscience after IT: Part H. Familiarization with managing the information base

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Abstract

The geoscience record stores information for later reuse. The management of bibliographic, cartographic and quantitative information have different backgrounds. All involve: deciding what to keep; structuring the record so that information can be found when needed; maintaining search tools, indexes and abstracts; defining the content by reference to metadata. The current approaches to managing the literature, spatial information and quantitative data may be subsumed in a more comprehensive object-oriented model of the information base.

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The requirement

The availability of quantities of data for analysis and display created a need to organize and store this information. Users could then revisit results and explore other ways of analyzing the data. The discovery of interesting relationships within one dataset might lead to investigation of similar relationships elsewhere, through access to a wide variety of related datasets. A database could combine data from many sources, and the user could select subsets for retrieval. A clearly defined

Documents

The number of relevant published documents in most fields is large enough for librarians to benefit from computer support in acquiring, storing and cataloging them. As can be seen in electronic journals such as D-Lib (D-Lib, 1995), many librarians are enthusiastic pioneers of IT methods.

A library requires a description of all the bibliographic items in the collection, such as books, serials, maps, videotapes or computer files. The objectives are to know what is there, and where it is, to

Database

Data are collected within a project to meet its objectives and methods. The dataset may nevertheless be retained as a persistent object, which continues to exist beyond the project. Its continuing value was considered in H 1.2, including reuse by the investigators, or others, to follow the reasoning behind the project’s conclusions, to confirm the results, to add to the data, and possibly to verify the data by repeating at least some of the observations. The persistent object may be evaluated,

Spatial data

Some vendors of Geographic Information Systems like to demonstrate the ability of their product to zoom in from a map of the whole country to an enlarged area, panning across the map to center on the point of interest. As the detail increases, a town takes shape, then individual streets and their names appear. Moving to a larger scale, buildings are individually identified. A new theme is selected, perhaps utilities — gas, water, sewers, electricity, telephone and television cables — showing

Object-oriented methods

By involving computer systems in the management and manipulation of information, we introduce machines into an intuitive process. In order to clarify the role of the machine, we need to take an introspective view of the process, thinking explicitly about the structure of our information, thought processes and objectives. Formal analysis may not be required, but it can help to have some knowledge of current methodologies for analysis, such as the entity-relationship modeling mentioned in H 3.

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