Building an historical remote sensing Atlas and multimedia GIS for Al Ain

The location of historical sites can often be inferred from remote sensing techniques by defining areas where human activity has likely occurred (villages, forts, oases, and burial grounds). Combining temporal remotely-sensed imagery in the form of historical atlas can reveal such activity in a quick and efficient way. Recent developments that have rekindled the use of GIS in this area include the use of sound to represent spatial data (acoustic visualisation), virtual reality (Jacobson, 1994), and integration of multimedia with GIS (Olson, 1997). The latter technique, integrating geographical data with text, tables, sound, images, and video, has a particular impact on geographic metaphors, as it is based on using all possible means of human communication (Goodchild, 2000: Sui, 2000). The objective of the study described here was to develop a historical remote sensing Atlas and multimedia GIS for the city of Al Ain in the Eastern part of the United Arab Emirates. It would portray, through striking visual imagery and brief explanations, the city's development between 1976 and 2000 (Yagoub, 2002).