PC BASED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SYSTEM FOR REMOTE SENSING 
LITERATURE AND DATA 
By 
Vasudha Satalkar, R.Nagarajan and L.S.Joshi 
Center of Studies in Resources Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay 400 076, India. 
ABSTRACT 
The need for improved information systems in recent years has become critical because of the rapid growth 
in size and complexity of knowledge as a whole and remote sensing in particular. 
At the Center of Studies in Resources Engineering,I.I.T Bombay, a PC based information system is being  de- 
veloped to facilitate easy storage and retrieval of literature and data products related to area of remote 
sensing. This paper describes the present status of the work. 
This paper describes the present status of the two systems that are being developed. 
Keywords : 
1. INTRODUCTION 
In many respects, remote sensing can be thought as a 
reading process. Remotely sensed data is collected 
from sensors onboard satellites, aircrafts etc and is 
analyzed to obtain information about objects, areas, 
or phenomenon being investigated. This can be com- 
pared to our ability to recognise letters forming 
words on a printed page. Beyond this, we can  recog- 
nize words from sentences, and interpret the  infor- 
mation that the sentence conveys. Thus, Data, when 
processed by human interpreter's brain becomes use- 
able information, 
The basic information requirements for all those 
involved in the use of remote sensing technology are 
a) Literature on remote sensing and the area 
of study in perticular. 
b)  Remotely sensed data products available 
for study. 
An information system for rapid retrieval of  rele- 
vant data is absolutely essential for all intrested 
in using remote sensing techniques. 
At the CSRE Reference Library, IIT, Bombay an infor- 
mation retrieval system for this purpose is being 
developed. It has two main components viz: 
# LIRS - Literature Information Retrieval 
System related to the literature on remote sensing 
availabe in CSRE Reference Library in printed form 
like books, reports, proceedings etc. 
# NRDIS - Natural Resources Data Information 
System related to the retrieval of information from 
354 
Data base ,Data dissemination , Literature , Remote sensing , Retrieval 
like satellite 
aerial photo- 
remotely sensed data products 
imageries,computer compatible tapes, 
graphs, toposheets and radar data etc. 
2. OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM 
The software is being developed under the FoxBase 
environment,a standard RDBMS package. 
2.1 Software requirements of the system 
Following are the miinimum software requirments of 
the system 
a) MSDOS operating system version 3.xx or 
higher 
b) As stated earlier, The software has been 
written under Foxbase Environment. So Foxbase com- 
piler must be present on the PC and should be 
placed in the PATH so that it can be accessed by 
the system. 
c) Number of files specified in  CONFIG.SYS 
file should be atleast 36. 
2,2 Minimum hardware requirement 
Following are the minimum hardware requirments of 
the system. 
a) PC XT/AT with atleast 640 KB RAM. 
b) Hard disk drive. 
c) One floppy drive. 
d) Color/Monochrome monitor.