Corba Based Interoperable Geographic Information Systems

A new generation of geographic information systems GIS emphasizing an open architecture interoperability and extensi bility in their design has received a great deal of attention in research and industry over the past few years The key idea behind these sys tems is to move away from the traditional monolithic view in system engineering to an open design embracing many co existing distributed sub systems such as database management systems DBMS statis tic packages computational geometry libraries and even traditional GIS While some success has been achieved in the area of geospatial data integration data models and formats it is still unclear what common services these open GIS should provide and how their design would bene t from available distributed computing infrastructures In this paper we describe a generic open GIS with an emphasis on the services it should provide We then study the design of such a sys tem based on object services and features provided by the Common Object Request Broker Architecture CORBA We also report on the use of the CORBA platform for implementing a fully operational dis tributed open GIS We conclude by arguing for a closer integration of GIS functionality into the CORBA architecture as already done for the medical and nancial domains