Summary of Working Paper No. 47-1996
I.3.1/II.3.2
By Stig Magnar Løvås, SINTEF Civil and Environmental Engineering, Trondheim,
and Odd Willy Brude, Norwegian Polar Institute, Oslo, Norway.
In order to facilitate storage, retrieval and analysis of information obtained
within the INSROP programme, an INSROP Information System has been developed
using GIS technology. The system has been jointly developed by Sub-programmes I
and II and is hence primarily designed to serve as a tool for these
sub-programmes. The system is, however, designed in a modular way to enable inclusion of
items from other sub-programmes later on.
The INSROP GIS system design was presented in Working Paper No.4 (Løvås et al,
1994). During the 1994/95 project work, ArcView 2.0, and later 2.1, became
available to the INSROP GIS development team. This software product provided new
capabilities that made us modify the original design. The main changes are that
INSROP GIS is now primarily an ArcView 2.x-application available for PCs
running Microsoft Windows 3.x. ARC/INFO is used to prepare data sets for use by
ArcView, and to carry out analyses beyond the capabilities of ArcView.
Although the purpose of the development of INSROP GIS was to develop the
system, a number of data sets have already been implemented as part of the
development process or in other INSROP projects. However, the system allows importing
new data, either in ArcView or ARC/INFO format, or as ASCII files using a
predefined structure. Depending on the type of information INSROP GIS enables display
of data on maps, in tables or as charts, and these are linked so that
information features selected on a map may be directly displayed in a table or a chart.
INSROP GIS includes general utilities for classifying data and also includes
some customised analysis utilities to process
As INSROP GIS is an ArcView 2.x application under MS Windows 3.x, an ArcView
2.x licence is needed to run INSROP GIS. We also recommend a PC486/66 as minimum
and 16Mb RAM (PC 386 and 8 Mb RAM is the required minimum). In addition to the
13Mb storage space required by ArcView, INSROP GIS requires an additional 2 Mb
for the basic INSROP GIS software. INSROP GIS data sets may range from a few
Kb to several 100 Mb. However, large data sets normally consist of a set of
smaller files which permit using only required subsets of a huge data set.
The authors of this working paper (Stig Magnar Løvås and Odd Willy Brude)
would like to thank the appointed project reviewer, Dr. Richard Luxmoore, World
Conservation Monitoring Service, for his comments, which have been incorporated in
the Working Paper.