Development of a database of quick-look plots for the earth and space science data

A database of quick-look plots of the earth and space science data has been developed and called DAGIK (Data-showcase system for Geoscience in KML). Although there are many projects that make the access and usage of the earth and space data much easier, the users still have difficulties to find the data with that they are not familiar. Quick-look plot is an easy way to show the novice users outline of the data; how the data looks like, when and where the data was observed. Most of the databases of the earth and space data provide quick-look plot on their WWW sites to help users to browse the data. As the metadata bases help to find data, a "one-stop" database of quick-look plots is useful for users to find data that the users don't use regularly. To construct such a database of quick-look plots, metadata of the plots should be embedded in the plot files. KML is one of the data formats that can contain plots and metadata. It is in XML. There are several browsers of KML, such as Google Earth and NASA world wind. DAGIK is a network-based database using KML files for the geoscience plots. We term such database of quick-look plots as "data-showcase system". It is a showcase of data for users to browse. The users who find an interesting data will use database or meta database following the link in the quick-look plots that contains metadata. We believe that the metadata of plots is a useful tool for easy data access as the metadata of data. In the presentation, we introduce DAGIK as an implementation of the data-showcase system.