ITR/IM: Collaborative Research: Development of a Western North American Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database

University Of Kansas Center For Research Inc, Lawrence KS

Investigators

Abstract

0112963 Walker This grant is supported through funds from both the NSF Information Technology Research Program and the Department of Defense, China Lake Naval Air Weapons Center, Geothermal Program. In a collaborative effort between the Universities of Kansas, Colorado, North Carolina and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, with assistance from the USGS-Reston, the PI's will compile existing age, chemical, and isotopic data from Late Cretaceous to Holocene extrusive and intrusive igneous rocks from the western U.S., British Columbia, and northern Mexico into a web-accessible electronic database. The resultant product, the Western North America Volcanic and Intrusive Rock Database (NAVDAT), will be integrated into a geographic information system (GIS) to allow visualization of complex age-compositional patterns in volcanism throughout the study region. Ultimately, they will also develop any necessary relational and graphical tools to allow users of the database to address a wide variety of issues concerning the geologic evolution and present volcanic state of the western U.S. Data entry will be undertaken at "nodes" established by each PI at their home institutions-each PI will be responsible for data compilation from literature, University, and DOE sources and for the creation of metadata for igneous rocks in the geographic areas of their expertise. Dr. Jeff Grossman (USGS, Reston) will be contracted to compile igneous rock age and data for NAVDAT from USGS sources. The central hub location for NAVDAT will be the University of Kansas. Here NAVDAT will be created and maintained, and a toolbox generated of geochemical and GIS routines. The basic NAVDAT IT architecture will use a combination of an Oracle relational database server, housed in the Kansas Geological Survey (KGS) at KU, in communication with a server housing the web server, the toolbox, a web development environment, and an Internet Map Server. The KGS will work in cooperation with the KU PIs to develop, update, and maintain the relational database component of NAVDAT on the DBMS servers at KGS. The entire database will be accessible by researchers around the world with a currently available, minimal web browser. ***