Providing map-driven database access via the World Wide Web

During the past few years there has been a growing interest in climate and environmental research topics. Activities in this field generate and require massive amounts of highly diverse data and information which is needed to document change and to improve understanding of processes affecting our climate. Because these issues are so broad, a data and information management challenge is to archive, preserve, and make data available in a useful form for researchers. The Alfred-Wegener-Institute is contributing to the worldwide effort of increasing availability of data and information about data by building up a national data directory for polar data. Directory systems primarily store metadata, that is information about scientific data. Being a critical issue to information systems in general, the design of the user interface has been given a lot of attention. This paper introduces a map-driven database access tool that was implemented at the Alfred-Wegener-Institute as part of a prototypical solution to the demands made on Web-based information systems.