GISCube, an Open Source Web-based GIS Application

Abstract:

There are many Earth science projects and data systems being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (JPL) that require the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Three in particular are: (1) the JPL Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) that measures the amount of water being generated from snow melt in mountains; (2) the Regional Climate Model Evaluation System (RCMES) that compares climate model outputs with remote sensing datasets in the context of model evaluation and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and for the U.S. National Climate Assessment and; (3) the JPL Snow Server that produces a snow and ice climatology for the Western US and Alaska, for the U.S. National Climate Assessment. Each of these three examples and all other earth science projects are strongly in need of having GIS and geoprocessing capabilities to process, visualize, manage and store GeoSpatial data.

Beside some open source GIS libraries and some software like ArcGIS there are comparatively few open source, web-based and easy to use application that are capable of doing GIS processing and visualization. To address this, we present GISCube, an open source web-based GIS application that can store, visualize and process GIS and GeoSpatial data. GISCube is powered by Geothon, an open source python GIS cookbook. Geothon has a variety of Geoprocessing tools such data conversion, processing, spatial analysis and data management tools. GISCube has the capability of supporting a variety of well known GIS data formats in both vector and raster formats, and the system is being expanded to support NASA’s and scientific data formats such as netCDF and HDF files. In this talk, we demonstrate how Earth science and other projects can benefit by using GISCube and Geothon, its current goals and our future work in the area.