Environmental Systems

This book is about initiatives to bring environmental management, engineering, and science to the multimedia age. Those initiatives integrate old with new methods for collecting, storing, modelling, representing, and making available environmental information on the Internet. On the World Wide Web environmental information is increasingly multidimensional. It includes text, audio, graphics, photographs, and video data types. As a result, environmental monitoring, information systems design and modelling activities are changing dramatically. Monitoring experts are becoming familiar with image and sound acquisition and processing tools. Environmental multidimensional data are part of the Internet-based information infrastructures, which are being developed at regional, national, and international levels. The wealth of multimedia information is facilitating the creation of a new generation of environmental models, using techniques originally developed for other areas such as the entertainment industry. This is a compact presentation of methods to handle multidimensional environmental information. The book combines the introduction of fundamental concepts with guidance to related and expanded views; these views are detailed in a comprehensive list of Web links - periodically updated at the book's web site - and a bibliography.