From GeoStore to GeoToolKit: The Second Step

Today's geo-information systems are closed systems mainly supporting geographic tasks in 2D space. In new spatial application areas such as environmental research, geology, city planning or telecommunications, however, a database and processing support for 3D/4D objects is required. Thus the development of object-oriented 3D/4D modeling and data handling components for geoinformation systems is a new challenge. We first report on our experience with GeoStore, an information system already in use for the management of geologically defined geometries. We then follow the way from GeoStore to the design of GeoToolKit, an object-oriented geo-database kernel system for the development of 3D/4D applications. GeoToolKit supports object-oriented modeling of geo-applications, spatial data maintenance within an ODBMS including spatial indexing and the 3Dvisualization of spatial objects and query results. Conversely, we also present the reconstruction of a geological application on top of GeoToolKit. Finally we give an outlook on our GeoToolKit research within an open component based environment of geo-information services.