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1. INTRODUCTION 
The National Center for Geographic Information and 
Analysis (NCGIA) in the U.S.A. has developed the 
NCGIA Core Curriculum (Goodchild and Kemp, 1990) 
for the instruction of Geographical Information Systems 
(GIS). The curriculum consists of seventy-five units of 
GIS materials associated with sixty slides covering 
topics from GIS components to GIS applications. How- 
ever, teaching these materials, even selectively, cannot 
be easily done because of the complexity of GIS and 
because parts of these materials need to be updated from 
time to time in order to match the latest developments of 
GIS. Traditional methods of instruction rely on linear 
media such as textbooks and lectures (Nix and Spiro, 
1990). Computer-assisted instruction has made practica- 
ble utilization of multimedia in instruction and is mak- 
ing impressive progress as an education approach. For 
educating people the problems and issues of environ- 
mental protection, Purdue University in cooperation 
with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 
developed seventeen  computed-based educational 
decision-support systems (Engel et al., 1992). These 
systems are being used for the instruction of environ- 
mental issues in high schools and have been adopted for 
the National Network for Environmental Management 
Studies program supported by EPA. Hypertext and 
graphics have been used to present information in all of 
these systems. 
As part of a project utilizing multimedia technology in 
GIS instruction, Srinivasan et al. (1991) have developed 
a system for teaching GIS applications in water 
resources management. The first application describes 
the integration of GIS with runoff estimation methods 
using the SCS (Soil Conservation Service) curve 
numbers techniques (Srinivasan and Engel, 1991). The 
second application shows how to assess agricultural 
non-point source pollution using the AGricultural Non- 
point Source Pollution model integrated with GIS 
(Srinivasan, 1992). The third application demonstrates 
the integration of GIS with the Aerial Non-point Source 
Watershed Environmental Response Simulation 
(ANSWERS) model (Rewerts and Engel, 1991). A 
multimedia development tool, HyperNeWS, was used to 
develop the multimedia systems for GIS instruction. 
The NCGIA GIS materials have widely been adapted in 
GIS instruction. For example, the Department of Geog- 
raphy at San Diego State University uses most of these 
materials in their GIS courses (Wright, 1991). However, 
students can not learn themselves with the NCGIA Core 
Curriculum because these materials were not developed 
for self-teaching. In order to make the NCGIA Core 
Curriculum wel suited for self-paced learning, we need 
to incorporate multimedia technology and to create 
hyper-linkages among individual units of the materials, 
and we also need to digitize the associated slides and to 
link them with a corresponding unit. 
The objective of this study was to incorporate mul- 
timedia technology into GIS education and thereby 
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develop a GIS instruction system. We re-organized parts 
of the NCGIA Core Curriculum based on multimedia 
organization principles, digitized the associated slides 
and stored them in a graphic database in support of the 
re-organized materials, and created hyper-linkages 
among the materials and slides. 
2. NCGIA CORE CURRICULUM 
The NCGIA Core Curriculum includes three volumes of 
GIS materials, covering an Introduction to GIS, Techni- 
cal Issues in GIS, and Application Issues in GIS, respec- 
tively. The first volume (Units 1-25) introduces 
hardware, software, and operations of GIS; The second 
volume (Units 26-50) describes GIS algorithms, data 
structures, advanced computational topics, and analysis 
of errors; The third volume (Units 51-75) deals with the 
applied aspects of spatial analysis, spatial decision mak- 
ing, and management issue. The electronic version of 
NCGIA Core Curriculum was written in plain text 
(ASCII) format without any graphics and hyper- 
linkages. 
3. MULTIMEDIA 
Multimedia (Hypermedia) refers to an evocative conver- 
gence of text, audio, graphics, still images, and moving 
pictures into a single, computer-controlled product. A 
multimedia system offers potential for linking 
knowledge units of interest, such as individual chapters 
or illustrations of a book. The hyper-linkage allows a 
user to access individual knowledge units in diverse 
approaches in a repeatable style. The access with educa- 
tional materials improves students' ability learn. The 
knowledge to be learned can be best taught through a 
multimedia system in many cases. 
The multimedia tool used in this project was Hyper- 
NeWS (The Turing Institute, 1990), which was 
developed by The Turing Institute, Glasgow, United 
Kingdom. It is a stand-alone hypercard-like multimedia 
tool. HyperNeWS runs under a computer-window 
environment of OpenWindows2.0 or higher and is writ- 
ten in the PostScript language. It can be easily inter- 
faced to external languages such as C, and the codes can 
be modified to enhance its ability since HyperNeWS is 
public domain. 
4. HYPER-GIS INSTRUCTION SYSTEM 
4.1 System Configuration 
Based on the NCGIA Core Curriculum and our experi- 
ence in GIS, we configured the multimedia system of 
GIS instruction (Hyper-GIS ) in five parts, including an 
Introduction to GIS, GIS Applications in Water 
Resources Management, GIS Applications in Water 
Quality Control, GIS Applications in Soil Conservation, 
and GIS Applications in Other Natural Resources 
Management. The Hyper-GIS system is hierarchical. 
We re-organized the NCGIA Core Curriculum because 
we wanted the Hyper-GIS system to be suitable for the