WEB-GIS application for managing spatial paleogeographic data

Abstract

Paleogeographic empirical information has spatiotemporal character and presented with huge arrays of data with different level of completeness and format. With the aim of complex study, creating reconstructions of natural conditions in the past, doing spatiotemporal correlations, comparison data of different scientists it is necessary to have effective approach for storage paleogeographic data in structured and machine-readable format. For solving this task it is offered to use web-GIS application (https://webgis.com.ua/paleo.html), which was created with free and open source technologies of web-development (JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3). During it’s development functionality of native JavaScript were used, extended with front-end framework Materialize and external libraries Lodash, jQuery and Leaflet. This web-GIS application uses only open paleogeographic data, which were published in scientific journals and monographs. The model of database consists of abstract entities: “site” and “horizon”, which could have unlimited quantity of attributes. Every site is characterized with unique digital identifier, natural zone, administrative region, geographic coordinates, author, scientists, year of investigation, general description and paleogeographic conclusion. Horizon is described with number, soil index, depth, age, morphology, micromorphology, geochemical content (Mn, Ni, Co, Cr, Mo, Cu, Pb), archaeological objects, etc. According to this approach all content of web-page is rendered dynamically that is useful for displaying different data from different sources with different level of completeness. This web-GIS application has modern responsive design, comfortable for use from mobile devices and platforms without loss of functionality. Offered approach enables analysis of huge amount of paleogeographic data, correlation between different spatial data, reconstruction natural conditions in the past, using knowledge achieved with different paleogeographic methods.