The design and implementation of software for extracting information from GIS files to a format appropriate for use in a spatial modeling software environment is described. This has resulted in publicly available c/c++ language programs for extracting polygons as well as database information from ArcView shape files into the Matlab software environment. In addition, a set of publicly available ...

Patterns have been used in software engineering to enable the reuse of successful solutions for recurrent problems in various steps of the software development process. In the development of geographic information systems (GIS), usually only geographic data are reused. This paper shows the adequacy of deriving as well as applying analysis patterns in the conceptual data modeling process of geog...

The provision of dynamic mapping and spatial analysis over the Internet poses challenges both in terms of technology but also bandwidth and performance. d-cypha has met this challenge with the implementation of a three-tier technology solution called d-cyphaMap currently being offered as an ASP service in New Zealand. Underpinned by Oracle Server, the d-cyphaMap solution also incorporates softw...

Geographic information systems are becoming more popular for end-user and decision support system construction but they incorporate software and concepts with some inherent problems for end-user computing. This paper identifies several concepts developed during the construction of one end-user GIS that can be incorporated in a wide range of end-user GIS. The approaches make extensive use of met...

Selecting a Geographic Information System (GIS) based on Free Software (FS) is a difficult task vis-à-vis its technological complexity, the wide range of this type of systems and their functionalities. Therefore, provides a set of quality characteristics used to evaluate FS-GIS. This set of characteristics is presented on the product perspective of the Systemic Software Quality Model (MOSCA), w...

The debate on vector versus raster based models is nearly as old as the concept of a GIS (Dutton 1979). It was restated as a debate between GIS with an object concept (not to be confused with object-oriented as used in software engineering; (Worboys 1994) uses the term object based GIS, where objects have sharp boundaries delimited by vectors and the GIS which model the continuous variation of ...