3. GIS PLATFORM INTERACTIVE FUNCTIONALITIES
3.1. Interactive functionalities
The spatial navigation controls are the elementary interactive components allowing
zooming and panning the map as shown in Fig. 5. These controls are automatically
supported by the SVG framework. The map navigation enable the user to choose his area of
interest, to zoom in or out, pan, recenter, obtain full view or to go back and forth to
previous views of the map. A zoom slider allows for continuous zooming. The reference
map allows to reposition the map extent and to get local-global orientation cues. An
additional search form assists the user to navigate by introducing a settlement name from
the area of interest and then zooming to the found search results. Coordinate display on
mouse move and an adaptive scale bar provide additional orientation and scale information.
I. Iosifescu, L. Hurni / GIS PLATFORM FOR INTERDISCIPLINARY ... 60
Fig. 5 Spatial Navigation Control of the COGEAR GIS Platform Development Prototype
The layer manager shows and hides map layers. It allows the user to select and
deselect them with a checkbox from a list. It also contains a short description about the map
category of the displayed layers and provides a legend for each layer as presented in Fig. 6.
Fig. 6 Layer Management of the COGEAR GIS Platform Development Prototype
Selected attributes and additional information can be displayed for research datasets
where such information is available. When using the Info tool, additional information can
be triggered with a mouse click and can be displayed in a separate window or embedded in
the view. This additional information is illustrated in Fig. 7 for a borehole and a sensor, but
its layout and design is very flexible. Researchers can on one side prepare external Web
pages that are appropriate to explain or offer additional cues for the datasets visualised in
the map. Moreover, the GetFeatureInfo operation of the WMS can automatically generate a
Web document for listing the important attributes of the feature of interest.
Fig. 7 Example of Additional Information Display of the COGEAR