Development and implementation of methods and concepts to extend graphical accesses to geodata archives

Site planning systems need a lot of information, especially spatial referenced data, to find the appropriate place for a new building and to solve different tasks of a site planning process. Existing systems offer access to geodata, which vary in their format depending on their producer of data. This difference in formats is one of the problems of the communication between suppliers and users of geodata. Another basic problem for site planning systems is to find, compare and visualise the data needed in the different tasks of this process. Regarding these problems the EU-funded project INVISIP created a framework, which aims to support all involved parties in the site planning process: municipal authorities and departments, planning offices, data suppliers and citizens. Existing solutions and methods were evaluated and concepts for extensions were accomplished. The present work focuses on Information Visualisation, which took an essential role in the development of this project. Based on the developed concepts prototype software was implemented as prove of concept and for testing purposes, called GeoCrystal. Based on Venn diagrams it aids users by complex queries composing the given searched terms. Another task of GeoCrystal is to visualise the result in a 3D information and visualisation space for geodata using familiar metaphors. This concept of information visualisation serves as an interface to geodata archives by using the 3D virtual library called GeoLibrary. Various case studies, mentioned in this work, have shown the importance of application-driven access to geodata archives. In addition to traditional search tools such as keyword-based, spatial or temporal searches GeoCrystal will offer adequate query possibilities to the user's application fulfilling the mentioned lack. The functionality of this new information visualisation component will be of important use especially for the multi-tasking process of site planning.