Background

A little background on who we are:

Name:	MIDN 1/C Hannibal Mitchell, 2008	MIDN 1/C Marc Schron, 2008
Major:	Information Technology, concentration in Environmental Applications
Service Selection:	Naval Flight Officer (NFO)	Surface Warfare

IT Majors, Environmental Applications concentration

The United States Naval Academy has nineteen different majors, and two specific ones within the Computer Science Department: Computer Science (CS) and Information Technology (IT).  For the Class of 2008 and earlier, anyone choosing to major in IT also needed to select a second discipline; the choices available were Environmental Applications, History, National Security Affairs, Microeconomic Applications, Macroeconomic Applications, Space Operations, Language Studies, Information Technology Management (Classes of 2005 & 2006 only).  We picked the first of these choices, and as such have taken a host of courses in the Oceanography Department.  We have studied basic atmospheric processes, general oceanography, remote sensing, and most recently have worked with geographic information systems (GIS) for data analysis and mapping.  This is how we came to be under the instruction of Professor Peter Guth.

Interests of Prof. Guth

Prof. Guth developed the MICRODEM program as an all-inclusive geographic information system package.  Utilizing it, a user can perform in-depth and robust analysis on a variety of data, imagery, and user-defined variables.  As a West Point graduate and history aficionado, Prof. Guth has relationships with a variety of historical and professional organizations that would like to utilize his GIS capabilities.  He steered us in the direction of the VII Corps and their march across Europe, which has turned out to be a very interactive project for both himself and us.  As specific needs arose for a more robust feature set, Prof. Guth modified the code of MICRODEM to accommodate our project's needs.

Capabilities of MICRODEM

Using MICRODEM, a user can start from a "dumb" image, that is to say simply a picture of a map with no geographic references tied to it.  From here, the image of the map can be registered to correspond with a standard set of coordinates, which then enables data to be recorded from the historical image.  Once positions of interest are recorded, it is a simple matter to overlay that database on the original imagery, then enable the output option into either Google Earth or Google Maps.  Provided with a range of dates, Google Earth provides the user with a scalable timeline to see temporal progressions.