Nothing proprietary as far as I know -- the Google Maps API is free
for any site that doesn't charge users and has a pretty simple API.
However, emitting HTML is the last step of a rather longer chain. The
main things you need to create these interfaces is to:
a) have the right data
b) know you have the right data
c) have a way to access that data
d) have an interesting interface tool
e) a way to bind the interface tool to the data
Some of these are very hard and no single solution covers them all.
Software can only really cover c, d and e, though clever algorithms
may help with b. The piece of technology that makes those geo sites
work is Manakin, an Apache Cocoon-based UI framework (that will be
replacing the current DSpace JSP-based UI), which amongst many other
things covers e) very nicely for repositories that contain lots of
different kinds of data.
To make electronics research papers look cool, I'd say b) is the right
place to start exploring. If you drill down to particular subject
areas, maybe there's a useful visualisation of some aspect that you
can arrange papers around. For geo data there are maps and satellite
images, and UI tools for them, so a lot is already covered -- maybe
for papers about the thermo-optical properties of chalcogenide
glasses, a bit more imagination is needed.
Rob
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