Approved for public release, distribution is unlimited / The Basic School (TBS) is the first school assignment for all Marine Officers. While assigned to TBS unrestricted ground officers compete for and are assigned a Military Occupational Skill (MOS). The process of educating the Marine Officers about the different MOSs is primarily accomplished by word of mouth at MOS Mixers (social events) and one-on-one discussions. The assignment of the MOS to the Marine Officer is based on the officer's lineal standing within his/her company. Officers are ranked lineally based on a composite score of academic and leadership grades. To ensure a quality distribution of officers into MOSs, the company is divided into thirds (Top, Middle, Bottom) and the vacancies assigned to the company are divided into thirds (Top, Middle, Bottom). Officers compete for an MOS within their assigned third. The current assignment system has remained virtually unchanged over the last thirty years. It is a mostly manually process that provides little visibility of the data, and does not utilize automated information tools for report generation of statistical information. This joint thesis team has developed a Two-Tier Client/Server Information Management System for use by the lieutenants and staff officers of The Basic School and it is called MyMOS. This system was developed using current industry standards that are compliant with those of the Department of Defense. It is the first of its kind at TBS and is designed to be employed as an operational system. MyMOS was designed with an interface that would maximize acceptance and reduce total ownership cost. / Captain, United States Marine Corps / Lieutenant Colonel, United States Marine Corps

The development and use of web-enabled tools for watershed modeling and decision-making have gained popularity lately with the increase in internet speed and accessibility. Most of the web-enabled tools available today address the watershed problems related to a narrow discipline like hydrology, or ecology etc. This thesis presents the work done in the development of a web-enabled integrated system, named WebL2W, which can address watershed problems in a more holistic approach. WebL2W integrates models from hydrology, economics, and biology in a single shell. The integration is performed using GIS as a common platform for database and interface management. A user accesses the system over the web and chooses pre-selected land development patterns to create a 'what if' scenario. The hydrologic model simulates effects of the scenario on annual runoff volume, flood peaks of various return periods, and ground water recharge. The economics model evaluates the changes in land value, tax revenue, and government expenditures as a result of the new land development scenario. The biology model evaluates effects of new land uses to fish habitats in the watershed. The design of the system is based on current software engineering practices such as object oriented programming (OOP) and relational database management system (RDBMS). The implementation uses the Visual Basic programming environment and Active Server Pages. / Master of Science

<p>With the rise of the Web, there is more interest among end-users to create different kinds of software that use elements from the Web or allow for networked interaction between users. Currently however, many available tools for this purpose are hard to use or lack a sufficient level of expressiveness. To provide new insights on the construction of tools that allow end-users to create their own Web-enabled software, this thesis explores design issues and consequences of applying the Turtle metaphor from the Logo-programming language to an end-user programming environment for Web-enabled applications. </p><p>In order to explore this, CrawLogo was created - a programmable end-user tool that supports the creation of Web-enabled applications using a Turtle-like control metaphor and language adapted from Logo. As a proof-of-concept, several Web-enabled applications were created using this new tool, including CrawLogo Pong, a somewhat alternative version of Atari’s classic Pong game, and a collaborative browsing environment, in which users can browse the Web together. The resulting CrawLogo environment allows for creating Web-enabled applications that - using more traditional programming languages - would be quite complex and require deep technical programming skills. Further, while utilizing a Turtle-like control metaphor in CrawLogo allows for the creation of some new types of applications and some new ways of interacting with the Web, it also raises new problems such as how to successfully design within the CrawLogo metaphor and how to create a meaningful representation of Turtle- geometry-based navigation on the Web.</p>

The large and ever-increasing amounts of multi-dimensional, multivariate, multi-source, spatio-temporal data represent a major challenge for the future. The need to analyse and make decisions based on these data streams, often in time-critical situations, demands integrated, automatic and sophisticated interactive tools that aid the user to manage, process, visualize and interact with large data spaces. The rise of `Web 2.0', which is undisputedly linked with developments such as blogs, wikis and social networking, and the internet usage explosion in the last decade represent another challenge for adapting these tools to the Internet to reach a broader user community. In this context, the research presented in this thesis introduces an effective web-enabled geovisual analytics framework implemented, applied and verified in Adobe Flash ActionScript and HTML5/JavaScript. It has been developed based on the principles behind Visual Analytics and designed to significantly reduce the time and effort needed to develop customized web-enabled applications for geovisual analytics tasks and to bring the benefits of visual analytics to the public. The framework has been developed based on a component architecture and includes a wide range of visualization techniques enhanced with various interaction techniques and interactive features to support better data exploration and analysis. The importance of multiple coordinated and linked views is emphasized and a number of effective techniques for linking views are introduced. Research has so far focused more on tools that explore and present data while tools that support capturing and sharing gained insight have not received the same attention. Therefore, this is one of the focuses of the research presented in this thesis. A snapshot technique is introduced, which supports capturing discoveries made during the exploratory data analysis process and can be used for sharing gained knowledge. The thesis also presents a number of applications developed to verify the usability and the overall performance of the framework for the visualization, exploration and analysis of data in different domains. Four application scenarios are presented introducing (1) the synergies among information visualization methods, geovisualization methods and volume data visualization methods for the exploration and correlation of spatio-temporal ocean data, (2) effective techniques for the visualization, exploration and analysis of self-organizing network data, (3) effective flow visualization techniques applied to the analysis of time-varying spatial interaction data such as migration data, commuting data and trade flow data, and (4) effective techniques for the visualization, exploration and analysis of flood data.

With the rise of the Web, there is more interest among end-users to create different kinds of software that use elements from the Web or allow for networked interaction between users. Currently however, many available tools for this purpose are hard to use or lack a sufficient level of expressiveness. To provide new insights on the construction of tools that allow end-users to create their own Web-enabled software, this thesis explores design issues and consequences of applying the Turtle metaphor from the Logo-programming language to an end-user programming environment for Web-enabled applications. In order to explore this, CrawLogo was created - a programmable end-user tool that supports the creation of Web-enabled applications using a Turtle-like control metaphor and language adapted from Logo. As a proof-of-concept, several Web-enabled applications were created using this new tool, including CrawLogo Pong, a somewhat alternative version of Atari’s classic Pong game, and a collaborative browsing environment, in which users can browse the Web together. The resulting CrawLogo environment allows for creating Web-enabled applications that - using more traditional programming languages - would be quite complex and require deep technical programming skills. Further, while utilizing a Turtle-like control metaphor in CrawLogo allows for the creation of some new types of applications and some new ways of interacting with the Web, it also raises new problems such as how to successfully design within the CrawLogo metaphor and how to create a meaningful representation of Turtle- geometry-based navigation on the Web.