WebMAPS

Welcome to the WebMAPS home page. WebMAPS is an eScience project developed at the Laboratory of Information Systems (LIS) of the Institute of Computing (IC) at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. It is conducted jointly with researchers from the FEAGRI (Agriculture Engineering - Geoprocessing Lab) and CEPAGRI (Center for Research and Education in Agriculture) at UNICAMP.

The WebMAPS project is a multidisciplinary effort involving computer scientists and experts on agricultural and environmental sciences.

The project`s goal is to develop a platform based on Web services for agro-environmental planning.

One big challenge concerns providing users with the means to interact with, summarize and analyze long time series of satellite images. This analysis must correlate these series, for arbitrary temporal intervals and regions, with data from other sources -- such as data to allow the characterization of a region (e.g., relief or soil properties), crop physiological characteristics and productivity. Data quality and provenance are important factors, directly influencing analysis results.

Besides massive data volumes, several other factors complicate data management and analysis. Heterogeneity is a big barrier – many kinds of data need to be considered, generated from often faulty devices. Moreover, data correlations must consider a variety of time warp factors. For instance, the effect of rainfall in a region, combined with temperature and soil parameters, takes months to be reflected in vegetation growth detected by satellite imagery. Still other factors cannot be directly measured, being thus derived from primary sources such as images. Furthermore, there is a wide range of user profiles, with many kinds of analysis and summarization needs. The first prototype is available, concentrating on spatio-temporal analysis of image series, creating graphs that show vegetation evolution in arbitrary areas.

Already financed by the Brazilian government (CNPq), part of this project has been submitted and approved for joint Brazil-Germany financing. 

A preliminary prototype of some results can be found here. The prototype is under development and only available in brazilian portuguese for the time being.

The project`s source code and management information are available here. However, to access this information you need credentials (login/password). Get in touch with us (by email) and we will consider your request.

To get the files you can use subversion:

svn checkout https://proj.lis.ic.unicamp.br/svn/webmaps/trunk/webmaps

--- For more detailed information on the project, contact the senior researchers.