John A. Lehman, Professor of Information Systems, School of
Management, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Lisa M. Lehman, Assistant Professor of Library Science,
College of Liberal Arts,
University of Alaska Fairbanks

A review of geographical information systems technology with implications for collaborative electronic cultural atlases

Decreases is the cost of graphically-oriented computer technology have led to increased adaption of tools which were originally developed for high return engineering applications to applications in the humanities and social sciences. Preliminary review of projects in this area reveals a common series of problems:

1. Projects tend to be closely linked to specific software products, leading to premature obsolescence.
2. Database designs based on idiosyncratic properties of specific software make sharing or combining the results of different projects difficult or impossible. This is especially critical given the collaborative nature of most large computer projects in the humanities.
3. Focus on short-term display quality for immediate publication rather than on data content sacrifices long-term research capabilities for short term convenience.

These problems are common to many projects involving computerization. This paper examines their impact with respect to an increasingly important class of projects - those which involve mapping data into geographical space. It examines the technology originally developed for engineering tasks and subsequently adapted to the visualisation of scientific data. The specific focus of this review is the set of solutions designed to deal with the class of problems as described above in the context of visualization of data in large collaborative scientific research projects with specific attention to the problems of database design. The results of the study are to be recommendations for database design methodologies to be used in electronic cultural atlases which combine multidisciplinary data.