This next bit is mostly thinking out-loud. I'm putting it here so that I don't lose track of it. I'd welcome your comments and criticisms. But, you also shouldn't feel too compelled to follow along here. It'll be much easier once I have something to show you.

To get moving here, I'm thinking mainly about scrounging around the data. One major influence here is that the Google Map API is very nice and very usable, but also very JavaScript. Being very JavaScript, it's somewhat limiting where one can use it. So, for a first cut here at least, I'm thinking about staying strictly browser-based.

With this in mind, I'm picturing an architecture where the webserver presents query results as JavaScript objects. The JavaScript in the browser can do some filtering of these results and present them using the Google maps API.

Even if the JavaScript idea doesn't pan out. I'm thinking that the basic query that I need from the client is a location(s)/instrument(s)/time(s). For flight-based, georeferenced data, I think the results should be something like this:

• Flight +
  • id
  • instrument
  • start time
  • end time
  • start location
  • bounding polygon of flight ?
  • Leg +
    • id
    • sequence in flight
    • start time
    • end time
    • start location
    • end location
      • Image +
        • id
        • sequence in leg
        • location
        • time
        • instrument
        • camera
        • width
        • height
        • wavelength(s)

I'm thinking that instead of getting flooded with all of this information at once, you'd make some query and it would return a bunch of flights. These would be displayed as polygons on the Google map and in a table down below. Each row of the table will have a checkbox. The 'info bubble' for each flight has a thing for you to click which will select the flight in the table.

Then, you can click on a button beside the table to load up the legs for the flights you selected. Now, the flight legs of the selected flights will be shown on the map and in the table. The 'info bubble' for each flight leg has a thing for you to click which will select that leg in the table.

Then, you can click on a button beside the table to load up the images for those legs you selected. Now, there will be markers for the first (every n-th?) image on each leg. The 'info bubble' for that marker shows a thumbnail of the image and gives you the option to select that image in the table below, select all images from that leg in the table below, move forward along the leg, or move backward along the leg.

Then, you can click on a button beside the table to zip-up all of your selected images.

The sequence in leg for the Image object is somewhat sticky though. I'm thinking with WASP, we'd want to have the sequence in leg be the same for all four images captured at the same time... or at least for the 3 IR cameras.

-- PatrickStein - 08 Jul 2005