Extending a Social Network Service on a Visualization Cloud Service for Deep-Sea Drilled Core Database

Abstract

The deep-sea drilling vessel called "CHIKYU"constructed by JAMSTEC has the riser coring system. It enables to drill into thousands of meters of deep sub-seafloor safely and continuously. One of the special functions onboard is an X-ray CT scanner to store the digital images of the natural structures of the core sample. The 3D information is saved into the DICOM format and stored as digital archive of core samples. The file size of the DICOM format for 150 cm of a core section becomes more than 400 Mbytes. Therefore, it is hard for the users to investigate many core section images on a personal computer that does not have powerful CPU and large memory. To resolve the drawback, we have developed a novel system for visualizing the core images. The system is able to serve the 2D images rendered the DICOM images on the server side. The user can control the perspectives of the core image using a web browser or an Android application. This service provides only the functions to browse the core images. However, the researcher needs to add memo to the images. It is used as the guides to find the remarkable points and the comments from the community. This paper describes the design and the implementation of the annotation functions that promote the research community of the geology.