De nationale atlas als organisatiemedium voor de toegang tot geo-informatie

Traditionally, the atlas is used as a tool to find geographic information. In a digital environment this could be a digital atlas. The authors take this idea as the starting point for their research proposal to use the national atlas, as metaphor for the most accurate and detailed source of geoinformation, as one of the entries to the geoinformation infrastructure of the Netherlands. Other functions of the atlas to this end should be the geographic ordering of the information, as geographic search engine, as interface to the underlying databases and as visualiser of the databases. At the same time attention is paid to the position of the atlas itself as part of the formal geoinformation infrastructure of the country and therefore providing access to geospatial data.