The University of Sydney Apple Australia Scholarship
2004

Over the last six months the GPlates application has matured, developing beyond its original purpose as a Linux-based replacement to the ageing PLATES software. GPlates has been ported to MacOS X, a task made easier by its use of the WxWidgets cross-platform GUI framework, the Autoconf pre-compilation configuration system, and the excellent UNIX-compatible system environment provided by OS X. The creators of GPlates (ie our development group) have also made a commitment to open standards and interoperability, embracing the Geography Markup Language (GML), an XML-based encoding standard published by the Open Geospatial Consortium.

For many decades Geosciences has primarily been an observation science. However, Macintosh computers paired with a wide selection of X-window-based open software now represent an opportunity for earth science educators to better convey the complex processes that have shaped the Earth to students. The Earth has a complex record of the dynamic interaction of tectonic plates, earth materials and life that provide clues to the physical and chemical evolution of continents, oceans and the atmosphere. Throughout the past decade, a large number of regional and global digital Earth data sets have become available, which are extremely valuable for teaching plate tectonic processes and the history of continents and ocean basins through time. It has become clear that our understanding of the dynamic Earth can be vastly improved through the combination of open software and open data bases on OSX-based Macintosh computers.

The GPlates Portal will allow users to track observations through geological time by linking the first open Australian earth science data base, entitled AEON-GIS (www.aeon.org), to the open GPlates software, developed by the international GPlates consortium (www.gplates.org), chaired by D. Müller at the University of Sydney. AEON-GIS is based on the GRASS Geographic Information System, which has recently become the primary GIS available for Mac OSX. GPlates will conform to the international Geographic Markup Language (GML) standard, and will represent a novel tool that can divide any GRASS-GIS data base into tectonic plates and reconstruct these data spatially and temporally through geological history, using the open GPlates software. Currently software which connect GIS data bases with plate reconstructions does not exist.

GPlates will provide a novel educational enabling technology, and become a catalyst for novel teaching approaches in earth science, including environmental change through time as well as resource exploration. GPlates is currently developed on a Linux platform. The University of Sydney Apple scholarship would provide an opportunity to port GPlates to native OSX, and therefore make Apple computers the platform of choice for teaching the principles of plate tectonic and earth evolution both a secondary and tertiary level.

The Macintosh is the only widely used desktop computer that is equipped with an open Geographic Information System (namely GRASS GIS), which can be used at no cost. GIS software and data is a multi-billion dollar industry, currently monopolised by ESRI, whose software only runs on Windows XP. The GPlates project will help promote Macintoshes as a sophisticated but low-cost GIS analysis tools for earth science teaching.

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