Recently, interest of submarine mineral resources has been increasing from the depletion of land resources around the world and many countries are involving in submarine mineral resource exploration work. South Korea is also in progress of mineral exploration and relevant study to ensure the submarine mineral resources from around the Korean Peninsula. As a result, the submarine mineral resource exploration data have been increasing annually. A database and 2D GIS-based system have been constructed for the management of the data. However, submarine mineral resource exploration data is explored and created on the sea-bed. Consequently, the visual confirmation of the water levels and marine landform is important for high dimension analysis. Therefore, the major aims of this study are to collect marine landform data from around the Korean Peninsula and to develop 3 dimension GIS based system that is linked to the submarine mineral resource exploration data. In detail, marine landform data were acquired for the Korean Peninsula and they were interpolated into raster file format. The raster file was then processed to be easily used and was entered into an Oracle database. Based on this database, 3D expression and overlap function between marine landform data and submarine mineral resource exploration data were designed using ArcScene offered by the ESRI. After design, 3D GIS based expression system was developed. Confirmations of locations and changes in the submarine mineral resource exploration data based on 3D GIS are enabled to support the efficient application of the proposed system. It is expected that this system will be highly useful for estimating the reserves of mineral resources and for providing valuable information for economic evaluations.

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