GeoWorlds -- First Time Users

GeoWorlds Project, Distributed Scalable Systems Division
University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute

Starting GeoWorlds

After installing the GeoWorlds software, you can fire it up by clicking on "Start", then on "Programs", then select the "GeoWorlds version 2.0" folder, and finally, select the "GeoWorlds Client" shortcut. Wait a few seconds and the three main system components will popup on your screen. These components are: the GeoWorlds Client, the Information Manager (Dasher) and the Map Manager (ArcView).

Creating an Incident

The GeoWorlds Client GUI is used to start a new map-document situational analysis. Just register a new incident session to keep track of all documents and maps used. This information will be automatically retrieved for you next time you login to the same incident.

Mapping the Incident Location

Once an incident is selected or created, its location is plotted on the ArcView world map. If you don't have ArcView installed in your system, than this information is not available to you. You can then zoom in to your region of interest, mark it and query our database for map layer information.

Obtaining more Map Layers

Users can query our databasde of map layers to get more layers associated with the incident location. The query resulst are displayed to users in a thumbnail viewer. The thumbnail viewer contains a list of available layers that can be downloaded. You should select the ones you want and download them to your local cache. This can take a few minutes, depending on the number of layers selected and the speed of your connection to the internet.

Selecting Place Names

Using ArcView's own functionality, you can select a region on the map and query against all available layers to obtain a list of place names refered to by the layers. This can include names of cities, streets, tourist attractions, vegetation, hospitals, and so on. The place names are then exported to the Information manager. A hidden feature of the system exports the geographical location of each name to the Information manager as well. This is used to tag documents that refer to one or more places, to locations in the map so that the documents or group of documents can be overlayed on the map.

Moving on to the Information Manager

The Information manager is used to query, categorize and analyze all information retrieved from the web. Users can also extract from all documents the ones that refer to one or more place names exported from ArcView. There are several services and features in the Information manager, and they are explained in some detail on the Information Manager web page.

Switching back and forth between Maps and Documents

As mentioned before, the place name extraction service is also used to associate geographical locations to documents that refer to at least one of the places exported from the Map manager (i.e. ArcView). These documents can then be clustered and plotted on the map. Clicking on one of these document clusters pops up a window on the Information manager with a list of all documents that refer to the locatoion the mouse was clicked. Conversely, selecting documents on the Information manager and clicking on the button "Locate on map", creates one or more clsuters of documents overlayed on the map.

Using Sample Incidents and Information Spaces

We have created several sample files containing incident information and their associated information spaces. We have also pre-processed some of the analyses resulsts and saved with the information space, so that you can immediately get a feeling of the potential capabilities of GeoWorlds.