A continuous growing amount of data from the Moon and the other planetary spatial missions is now available to the scientific community. This in turn is triggering a series of requirements related to archiving, management and distribution of large data volume to scientists all over the world.
Nowadays the archiving and delivering systems of geographic data faces a period of enormous growth, also for the great contribution given by players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft very focused on the consumer market rather than on the professional one. This means that a great percentage of the Internet users has already seen and maybe used maps delivered by web.
Many of the concepts involved in managing and delivering of terrestrial maps can be applied also for data of other planets.
Luna is a WebGIS solution attractive and simple to use even for the unskilled user, but at the same time useful for scientists.
Luna was developed in "Science and Moon Exploitation" project financed by Italian Space Agency as promotional demo of WebGIS system capability to design, implement, generate and deliver maps on the web.
The WebGIS application Luna is realized by using Clementine Mission data and developed in ASP and Javascript.
By the WebGIS the user can choose among various layers both rasters and vectors and can perform some typical GIS operations like pan, zoom, query of data and metadata, information layers selection and overlaying, measure of distances, polygons drawing. More specific for planetary applications: search for specific features like craters, seas and other, plus precise pointing via some coordinates.
The use of the web as a dissemination medium for maps can be regarded as a major advancement in cartography and opens many new opportunities, such as real-time maps, cheaper dissemination, more frequent and cheaper updates of data and software, personalized map content, distributed data sources and sharing of geographic information.
Cart@net, developed by Planetek Italia, is the WebGIS solution for the management and consultation of large raster and vector datasets, ideal to distribute on-line catalogs of cartographic data.
