That's very important for us. Political boundaries cannot be seen from space. They are an artificial concept that we superimpose, I'm sure for many good reasons, but not necessarily for reasons of Earth resource management. The Geosphere Interactive Visual Library Van Sant is gathering and creating visualizations for global databases acquired from NOAA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, The World Bank, the National Geographic Society, the World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and other government and nongov-ernment organizations. The databases are digitized, coregistered in geographic information systems, rendered for overlays, and animated for time-lapse sequences and zooms.
Integrated databases can provide for layered viewing, special effects, or flight simulations.
The product is a laser disk prototype of the Geosphere Interactive Visual Library, which debuted with great success at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, June 1992. The library's interface is a map of the Earth with various icons representing geographic, human, land, and animal systems. The viewer might select the habitat of the Asian elephant, from the 1970s to the present time, for example. By overlaying this database with agricultural, demographic, and other databases, the viewer can easily understand the relationships between the activities of elephants and man. The library would be networked so that anyone with a computer terminal could access the information.