The Spatial Information Systems Lab conducts research and develops technologies and infrastructure that enable users to access, integrate and manage spatial information. Application domains range from Earth science, environmental and demographic analysis, to neuroscience and medical records. Working in collaboration with other SDSC R&D Labs and UCSD programs (such as NCMIR, SIO, USP), we support spatial information processing and Web mapping in a variety of projects. Our main research focus is spatial and survey data integration, new online technologies such as WSDL/SOAP and web services, and XML-based web mapping.

The lab is lead by Ilya Zaslavsky.

CUAHSI

CUAHSI (Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science, Inc) is an organization representing about 100 universities in the United States to develop infrastructure and services to support the advancement of hydrologic science and education. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, lab members are developing hydrologic information system, a distributed information management infrastructure supporting data access, integration, analysis and modeling in hydrology.

The central goal of this program is to implement modern scientific approaches to identify and characterize genomic stress responses elicited by waterborne pollutants found at Superfund sites. Under the aegis of the Superfund grant, David Valentine, Joyce Stillman and Ilya Zaslavsky are developing the GIS part of the NIEHS Hurricane Response Portal. Lab members are also involved in the Regional Workbench Consortium Initiative which in turn has spawned a series of interesting projects, such as mapping of endangered and sensitive species for the San Diego Conservation Resources Network.

BIRN is a multi-year research and development effort funded by the NIH's National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) to produce an integrated framework for the collection, analysis, management, and visualization of diverse neuroscience data sets. Lab's director Zaslavsky is a member of BIRN Leadership team and a lead technical designer of the Smart Atlas, a collaboration between BIRN-CC and the Mouse Brain testbed on the development of spatial information infrastructure for sharing and integrating brain images and segmentations.

CLEANER (Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research) is a group of NSF-supported planning projects focused on the development of cyberinfrastructure for environmental engineering. Zaslavsky is a member of the CLEANER cyberinfrastructure committee, and a Co-PI on a new environmental observatory project recently funded by NSF.

GEON is based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with support for "intelligent" search, semantic data integration, visualization of 4D scientific datasets, and access to high performance computing platforms for data analysis and model execution via the GEON Portal. Lab member Ashraf Memon is the GEON's software architect.

Spatial Analysis and GIS
Spatial Data Wrapping and Mediation
Web-based interactive mapping
XML-based vector graphics
Web services for spatial and survey data processing
Mapping on mobile devices
Online GIS within research portals
Novel GIS applications in medical informatics