User's Guide to the Gaea Visual Environment

Gaea is a spatio-temporal data analysis and management system under development at the WPI Computer Science Department. The goal of Gaea is to provide scientists with an extensible and easy-to-use environment for managing data, data operators, and experiments. The key to Gaea's power is in capturing and maintaining metadata about data, operators, and experiments, and using this metadata to facilitate browsing the available information, creating and executing experiments, and extending the capabilities of the system. GaeaVE is the front-end to the Gaea system. It provides users with the ability to browse data, create processes, execute processes, and create new data classes. The start up window looks like this (you can click on the menu items to get more information on each component):

the Class Editor allows users to examine the attributes of each data class within Gaea, create new classes, either from scratch or as a modification of an existing class, or change the label or type of any attribute within a class.
the Process Editor allows users to examine the node and link structure of an existing process within Gaea, create new processes, either from scratch or as a modification of an existing process, or edit an existing process. Processes may also be executed for testing purposes from the Process Editor.
the Browser (User's Guide under construction)
the Process Executor allows users to execute a previously created process and store the results in the database. Users instantiate input data objects by specifying constraints on attributes of the data classes. It is the responsibility of the process to create a unique output data object instance for storage.

Matthew O. Ward (matt@cs.wpi.edu)