A Mobile-agent and Gml Based Framework for Integrating Distributed Gis*

Geographic Information System (GIS) based on Internet as a promising research field brings new opportunities and challenges to geographic information accessing, sharing and disseminating. However, the inherent limitation of current Internet GIS architecture based on connection makes it incompetent to fulfil various requirements of GIS applications under dynamic, complicated and distributed computing environment such as the Mobile Internet. As a recently developed paradigm in distributed computing, mobile agent can especially benefit (Mobile) Internet applications on providing asynchronous task execution and more dynamics, supporting flexible and extensible cooperation, reducing communication bandwidth, enhancing real time abilities and higher degree of robustness, enabling off-line processing and disconnected operation. On the other hand, Geography Markup Language (GML) as an emerging standard of geographic information exchanging offers a new way to integrate geographic information on network. In this paper, we propose a new paradigm in constructing distributed GIS by combining mobile agent and GML technologies, in which mobile agent technology is used to overcome the inadequacy of other traditional distributed computing paradigms and GML to solve the heterogeneity problem of various GISs.