A Marine GIS Software Package in VB6 A.C.Dinesh Geologist Geological Survey of India, India Email: acdinesh@rediffmail.com Planning of a marine cruise manually is always laborious and time consuming. The enormous amount of data that are being generated in every cruise should be formatted and kept in a database. A user will be always anxious to send a query into a set of data and he will be desirous to plot the query-result on a projected map. Various types of data pertaining to marine geological surveys are not available under a single roof. Moreover, many of them are not in digital format. In order to overcome all these, a software package was developed in VB6 which includes the following. 1) A ‘Cruise Planner’ (A.C.Dinesh et al.,2001) software which facilitates a user for easy and quick planning. The user can select any area falling within the EEZ of India from the NHO Charts kept in the database on different scales as raster images. The software facilitates the user to plot way points and draw cruise tracks on charts with utmost ease. The toolbar provides a set of different symbols enabling the user to represent all types of samples and other observations on the chart. The locations of the way points and sample points will be stored in separate data files which can be directly fed to the Global Positioning System (GPS) onboard. The final chart can be stored as Bitmap or JPEG file format and hard copy can be retrieved. Information regarding symbols used, total area, length of cruise tracks etc. are given in the legend of the chart automatically. 2) MgdMAP (A.C.Dinesh et al.,2005) is a software which enables the user to keep the data pertaining to cruises in various tables of a database. Database of sample description as well as its geochemical, grain size and heavy mineral details are useful in the study of marine sediments. Retrieving desired data-set from the database and plotting them on a map manually is a time consuming process. This software enables even untrained user to create and edit the data and retrieve the desired data-set by giving simple/ complex queries and also to plot the data on a Mercator projected map. Four tables are designed in MSAccess - a) Sample details b) Chemical details c) Grain Size details d) Heavy Mineral details. The user can directly feed the data by opening the respective table. After creation of the database, user can connect the Access file with the software and can link the four tables in five different ways. After linking the tables, the user can send simple or complex queries to retrieve the data of the combined table. The query result can be plotted either on selected NHO chart, or on any part of India's coast map produced on desired scale and size which is projected on Mercator using projection equation. Many other facilities are also available with the software. 3) Data and Maps is the third one in this package which helps the user to collect various types of data (digital or images) according to user’s need. The types of data include- digital data of Indian coast on different resolutions, bathymetric data, imageries on different themes, state boundaries, locations of major and minor river mouths, creeks, places etc. Locations of ODP and DSDP sites are also kept in the database of the software. User can select an area from a Mercator projected map of India and surroundings and prepare a map of the selected area on desired scale or size. Another salient feature of the software is the InfoBank (Information Bank) which furnishes voluminous information pertaining to Marine Sciences.