Decision making is one of people’s usual activities since situations that require making decisions constantly arise in their everyday life. Very often, however, the dimensionality and complexity of decision problems reach far beyond human’s capabilities while the cost of a poor decision may be rather high. Therefore, there is a need in software support to the decision making process, and, in response, a wide variety of software tools, from tools for building graphs and charts to expert systems and intelligent agents, are offered as decision support systems. The reason for this variety is the compound, multi-faceted nature of the decision making process.
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In Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) a micro focused soft x-ray beam is generated by a zone plate, illuminates the sample and the transmitted x-rays are detected. Transmission images are obtained by a raster scan of the sample. Spectra are obtained in point, line or image mode by acquiring signal at multiple photon energies. The 5.3.2STXM is an interferometrically controlled device mounted on a dedicated bending magnet beamline. The user controls both the beamline and the microscope from a single computer.
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Google Earth is a popular and widely used geographical browser. It is a standalone application that enables spatial data from a variety of sources to be displayed, explored and visually compared. Google Earth has the following important characteristics:
• Free
• Easy-to-use and intuitive user interface. Data are displayed on an interactive globe that can be rotated and zoomed to visually explore data in different regions of the world and at different spatial resolutions.
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A number of new geospatial viewing tools from major players in the Internet industry have recently appeared on the scene and are taking the geospatial world by storm. Google,Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon have all released web-based mapping tools in the recent past, and collectively these new players to the industry have raised the bar for Internet mapping. Although their functional capabilities don’t provide anything we haven’t seen in web offerings from traditional GIS vendors, their emergence has been significant in that they have managed to capture a wider audience. Google, in particular, has emerged as the leader of this pack with it’s recently released Google Maps product which provides a slick, highly responsive visual interface built using AJAX technologies along with detailed street and aerial imagery data, and an open API allowing customization of the map output including the ability to add application specific data to the map.
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Google Earth is a virtual globe program, allowing viewers to visualize data on top of displayed satellite images of the Earth’s surface. Launched in 2005 and released to the public in 2006, Google Earth fast became a household name hailed as a revolution for humanitarian development, much as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were several decades ago. According to MapAction, “There seem at present tobe two distinct groups of humanitarian practitioners: those who are already, albeit tentatively,exploiting Google Earth and related geospatial methods in their work,and those whowill be, as soon as they see their first demonstration of its potential.” (MapAction, 2008: 9)
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Sensors are everywhere, which includes space, air and ground. Earth phenomena such as disasters also occur everywhere; such as wildfires, floods and volcanoes. There is a need to rapidly deploy existing sensors to aid emergency workers and investigators. The vision for our effort is to provide users the capability to create “mash ups” (a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience), similar to that used by Google Earth users to create a composite map with overlays of sensor information and from other data sources such as weather, traffic, urban construction etc. We make use of Web 2.0 technology and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) web service standards to enable access to Earth’s sensors is an emerging mega-trend which will lower the cost of producing customized science by an order of magnitude. This paper will outline the key aspects of our experiments to date and implications for the future and in particular the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) international effort.
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Modern Geographical Information Systems (GIS) [1] provide a service-oriented architecture for interacting with geographical data sets and related maps. Web-based GIS systems are architected around the same principles as more general Web service systems based on SOAP [2], WSDL [3], and REST. Mirroring the World Wide Web Consortium and OASIS Web service standards-making bodies, the Open Geospatial Consortium [5] defines open standards for messages, XML data formats, and access protocols that are specific to the GIS community. In addition to OGC-based services, there are many companies (such as ESRI and AutoDesk) that provide proprietary, commercial solutions. Services from these various providers are not normally interoperable.
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MAPSTER has been designed to provide easy and intuitive access to fish and fish habitat information for a widely dispersed and diverse group of individuals. With the release of version 2.0, there have been many changes in the appearance and functionality of MAPSTER. To help new or returning users, this tutorial has been prepared to review the application’s tools and features.
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