The National Atlas Over Sweden is an encyclopedia in 17 volumes which presents Sweden for Swedes and for the world. It is a description of the geography of Sweden in maps, tex and pictures. Each volume is devoted to a special theme.
The principals of the National Atlas of Sweden are the National Land Survey of Sweden, the Central Bureau of Statistics and the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
The last volume (number seventeen) is now under production. The complete series of volumes has a total of 2500 pages, 3000 maps and 5000 themes. All maps are created using ArcInfo and modern PrePress techniques. This database is know on it's way to be published in ArcView. One of the main goals in this implementation is to give the unexperienced user a simple way to search and present data. The ambition is to make a minimum of software-development in ArcView and instead concentrate on the search-interface. An integrated metadatabase and datadictionary stores information about all datafiles and presentations. Search in this metadatabase is made with an external program that communicates directly with ArcView. The presentation will focus on the metadatabase for simple access to data.
The main reasons for using the metadatabase in this product is: simplify search after data, present geographic information in a simple way, support "good" cartography, classify and document all data in a standardized way.
The types of data that can be stored in the database are except geographic datasets: themes, views, pagelayouts. These types of presentations is also stored in ArcViews projectfiles. When stored in this way it is not simple to search and classify these extended datatypes. Due to this and other limitations we decided not to store information in project-files and instead include these in our metadatabase
All information in the database (including themes, maps and pages) can be found using three different search-methods. These are Hierarchical, Searchtopics, Alphabetic list.
In a hierarchical search all data is classified in a system much like the filemanager with some major additional advantages. The hierarchy uses the levels book-chapter-section. You can first click on the book to see all the chapters and then see all the sections in a chapter. Each source of information can be associated with more than one book/chapter/section. You can also choose to directly display all information included in a book and not having to open all subsections first.
When searching with searchtopics you can choose from a list of words and see all associated datasets.
When doing the alphabetical search you can choose among all data in a sorted list.
The database consists of around 30 tables in dBase-format. The interface is written in C++ and communicates with ArcView trough DDE. The information transferred between the systems is stored in one common table.