Object Interoperability for Geospatial Applications

In this paper, we analyze a geospatial application for visualizing U.S. election results in order to show the problems that need to be solved in the mapping between different XML representations and their conceptual models. We propose a framework that provides a number of core classes that allow applications to treat XML documents as graphs and to evaluate XPath expressions against such document graphs. We also propose a mechanism that allows information to be exchanged between document types. Our goal is to ultimately attain an overall framework for interoperation where maintenance problems are minimized. To achieve this, we anticipate the need for introducing metadata in the semantic layer that will guide the translation process between document types.