Introduction
About:
Descartes XXI (formerly IRIS)
Intelligent System for Spatio- Temporal
Exploratory Data Analysis
Version 2.016, 27/06/2001
(c) Anrienko
1995-2001, GMD 1992-1001
e-mail gennady.andrienko@gmd.de
http://borneo.gmd.de/and/
Development of the system was partly supported
by EU-funded projects
CommonGIS (ESPRIT project 28983, 2000-2002)
URLs
http://commongis.jrc.it/
and http://www.ccg.leeds.ac.uk/spin/
Java
version 1.3.1, Windows NT, ver 4.0
The system includes pieces of software implemented by others:
1. File
management utilities by IITP RAS, http://www.iitp.ru/
2. Implementation of
the Open GIS simple feature specification by University of Bonn
http://www.guib.uni-bonn.de/exse/results/welcom.html
3. Map print by
Dialogis GmbH, http://www.dialogis.de
Description:
Descartes, a Java based GIS (geographic information system) accessable in the internet, supports the creation and interactive analysis of thematic maps. The user can choose out of a set of spacial statistical values and Descartes creates automatically a set of maps using cartographic knowledge which visually include the values and their relationships.
It is a domain-independent software. Its domain-specific instantiations
are called applications. From the system's perspective, an application is a
number of files with data to visualize and analyze together with some service
files that inform the system how to handle the data.
An application should
include data files of two kinds:
· tables with attribute data
referred to some spatial objects (districts, towns, countries, and so on). The
objects are denoted in the tables by their identifiers. A table should contain
a column with object identifiers;
· geographic layers, i.e. files
containing points, lines, or areas (polygons) in vector format. For each table
there should be a geographic layer containing the spatial objects from this
table. These objects should have in the geographic layer the same identifiers
as in the table.
An application may include several tables referring to one
and the same geographic layer as well as to different layers. A table may not
refer to several geographic layers at once. There may be any number of
geographic layers in an application. The layers that do not contain objects
from a table may create a geographical background for data presentation. Which
layers are available in an application is presented in the legend of the map.
In Descartes it is possible to build multiple displays representing
different attributes of the same data set or, possibly, the same attributes in
different ways. Thus, the user can open one or more maps and various kinds of
non-cartographic displays: dot plots, scatter plots, parallel coordinate plots.
All these displays are dynamically linked. Thus, when the user points with the
mouse on an object in one of the displays, the graphical elements corresponding
to this object (contour in a map, dot in a dot plot or a scatter plot, line in
a parallel coordinate plot) are simultaneously highlighted in all the displays.
More information on dynamical linking can be found here.