Building GML-native web-based geographic information systems

Disaster response systems are designed to facilitate decision-making based on large amounts of heterogeneous geographic information. Most geographic information systems (GISs) use relational databases to manipulate information efficiently. However, they suffer from interoperability issues because they need to expend significant effort mapping heterogeneous geographic information, which may have complicated structures, into relational data models, and vice versa. Geography Markup Language (GML) is regarded as a standard for expressing, storing, and exchanging geospatial data, and has been applied to help solve interoperability problems. Interestingly, no GIS has been built on native XML/GML technologies so far. There are two possible reasons for this: current XML processors are incapable of processing geospatial information, and they are inefficient in manipulating large XML documents. In this paper, we resolve these two difficulties and move forward to realizing GML-native web-based geographic information systems. & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.