GIS as Project Manager in Geophysical Applications Software

The changing trends in information technology have greatly influenced the role of GIS in spatial data management, analysis, processing and presentation. It has evolved from the conventional cartography and image processing to advanced 3D visualization and dynamic graphics tools. Due to this evolving nature of GIS, it has found wide applications in a number of diverse fields. Geophysical exploration projects involve data acquisition at hundreds of spatial locations resulting in large number of datasets. It takes a great deal of time to manage all these datasets during data processing and interpretation. This paper presents the use of GIS as an effective project management tool, providing an interactive data access interface in compute intensive geophysical processing applications. A reusable GIS software component is presented which can be used by geophysical applications to manage their datasets. A practical example is included to demonstrate the implementation of this GIS component as an embedded Project Manager in a seismic refraction software.