The WebMaps Project

Overview

WebMaps is involves experts from different areas, both in Computer Science and in Agro-environmental studies.

On the Computer Science side, the project involves researchers in databases, computer networks, software engineering, man-machine interfaces and image processing. These experts will cooperate along four major research and development lines: application design and development; interfaces; image processing, data analysis and spatial processing functions; database systems; and data communication across distributed systems using Web Services.

From the agriculture side, the project involves researchers in image processing for weather forecast and crop productivity, crop analysis, agro-environmental planning and precision farming.

The project's major institutional sponsor is CNPq (Brazilian National Research Council). It is being developed jointly at the Laboratory of Information Systems LIS , Institute of Computing and at the Geoprocessing Laboratory GEO of the Agriculture Engineering Faculty.

Overall goals

The project's goal is to specify and develop a Web information system to support monitoring and planning of agriculture activities in Brazil. This system will take advantage of advances in Semantic Web initiatives, and implement data access via Web Services. The idea is to create a basic platform to support formulation, implementation and evaluation of integrated practices in agriculture with environmental preservation.

The project will be strongly based on a satellite image database containing daily images of the region of Sao Paulo state, Brazil. Initial tests will concentrate on sugar cane crops. The project started in Aug 2003, and concentrates on the following issues:

Production of innovative scientific results, which will be made public by means of different types of publications (papers, technical reports, theses);
Development of tools for solving specific issues in geoprocessing and satellite image processing, that will be made available on the Web;
Incorporation of new technologies to products under development.

Principal investigators

The following researchers compose the main project team:

From the IC-UNICAMP Institute of Computing, UNICAMP
Coordinator: Claudia Bauzer Medeiros (databases)
Neucimar Jeronimo Leite (image processing)
Alexandre Xavier Falcao (image processing)
Maria Cecilia Calani Baranauskas (human machine interface
Edmundo Roberto Mauro Madeira (computer networks)
Eliane Martins (software engineering)
From the FEAGRI (Agriculture Engineering - Geoprocessing Lab), UNICAMP
Jansle Vieira Rocha
From the CEPAGRI (Center for Research and Education in Agriculture), UNICAMP
Rubens Lamparelli
Jurandir Zullo Jr.

For details on the project's state and results, contact the coordinator

Claudia Bauzer Medeiros home page
IC - UNICAMP - CP 6065
13081-970 Campinas SP - Brazil
email: cmbm at ic.unicamp.br

Last edited on 11.Sept.2004 (cmbm)