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Geotoolkit: Opening the Access to Object-oriented Geo-data Stores
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Egenhofer, Max J. Fegeas, Robin Kottman, Clifford A. |
| Copyright Year | 1999 |
| Abstract | 1.1 Introduction Today a typical geo-information system (GIS) is a complex " historically grown " software package which inevitably inherits the software-engineering practices of the past. Application programming within such systems is extremely complicated. Data structures and functions are often completely hidden from the user. As a result, they are hardly extensible to meet the requirements imposed, for instance, by 3D/4D-modeling. The next generation GIS should benefit from modern software engineering technologies among which one of the most promising is component-based design. Software building organized in libraries with consistent programming interfaces will enable the fast assembly of a special-purpose application for a particular domain. An application-specific component can be customized and re-used (with necessary extensions and modifications, if required) for the development of related applications. Following this approach, a general-purpose geo-information system will be substituted by a family of specialized subsystems which, due to the common design basis, are well suited for the inter-communication and mutual data exchange. An object-oriented programming environment can provide the necessary support required for the integration of diverse software components. In general, we are strongly convinced that object-orientation (and object-oriented data management in particular) will play a key role in the development of the future generation geo-scientific systems because it has the tendency to dissolve the boundaries between programs and databases, allowing data structures used in, e.g. numerical models, to be persistent objects, maintained directly by object-oriented database management systems. Complex data structures optimized for efficient computations in main memory need no longer to be pre-assembled from numerous relational tables. An integrated representation for algorithms and data within object-oriented databases enables access not only to the data but also to the data processing methods associated with the data. Due to this fact, object-oriented geodata stores could play the central role in data and service exchange between heterogeneous geo-scientific applications: uniformly stored database objects can serve as mediators between diverse application-specific representations. However, direct database-level interoperation is not always possible because of the extreme heterogeneity of already existing applications, software environments and hardware platforms. A necessary infrastructure to deal with the heterogeneity and remote access in the object-oriented context can be provided by a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). In this chapter we present our experience with GeoToolKit-a component software for the development of 3D/4D geo-scientific applications. Its backbone is a class library for the efficient storage and retrieval of spatial objects within an object-oriented … |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.geo.informatik.uni-bonn.de/publications/1997/interop97/interop97-book.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.geo.informatik.uni-bonn.de/publications/1997/interop97/interop97.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
