| The University of New Brunswick, Geographical Engineering Group scientists envisioned and have set in place initiatives towards the development of a long-term and multidisciplinary project, the Delta Project. This project has the mandate to create new and modify the existing Information Technology (IT) infrastructure, to support the virtual communities by developing tools, policies, training, and regimes. The project has three main research areas: policies, public participation, and technology.;This research report evaluates a commercial GIS application, CARIS Spatial Fusion, to investigate the possible utilisation of it in the Delta Project. The ‘technology’ side of the project needs to identify the methodologies and the tools that will permit the public to interrogate a diverse number of information sources on the Internet. CARIS Spatial Fusion application was developed to function in the virtual environment, and claims to have powerful visualizing functionality when accessing local or remote databases using a Web browser.;In this research, a variety of spatial datasets are collected from different information sources. The functionality of CARIS Spatial Fusion was assessed extensively and the spatial datasets were evaluated using application's visualization features. The strengths, limitations, and future refinement recommendations are provided. The research concludes with the author's suggestions with regards to employing the application in the Delta Project. |
