The catalytic boost of critical mass usage of the World Wide Web (WWW) has brought about the shift in the traditional geographic information systems (GIS) paradigm and engendered new challenges and opportunities. The traditional GIS paradigm involves the use of huge databases and large expensive GIS software packages confined to local disks. The new paradigm, however, enables geospatial data to...

ion and Decomposition in Interoperable GIS Agn es Voisard Heinz Schweppe Institut f ur Informatik Freie Universitat Berlin Takustr. 9 D-14195 Berlin fvoisard,[email protected] Abstract With the advent of distributed computing and the increasing trend towards the reuse of geographic data, a new generation of geographic information systems (GIS) is currently being speci ed. The key cha...

Research on "Society and GIS" has fallen into a trap to the extent that it separates these two realms. As an antidote to rampant technological determinism, this paper demonstrates how the highly technical decisions inside GIS software have a distinctly social flavor, in particular they specify a division of labor (and thus of knowledge). In the case of map registration, the software adopts an o...

An increasing number of GIS applications rely on computer networks and the World Wide Web for accessing their resources, being both datasets and software operations. Constructing applications in such a distributed GIS environment needs proper solutions for easy discovery of the necessary software and data components. Metadata is of primary importance for the identification of the connectivity b...

Web GIS (Geographic Information Systems) service systems provide the various GIS services of analyzing and displaying the spatial data with friendly user-interface. But, early systems don’t support open environment and interoperability. It is difficult to access diverse data sources, which provide each spatial data format. And, these systems have the difficult of upgrading the function and redu...

Over the last decade an increasing number of free and open source software projects have been founded that concentrate on developing several types of software for geographic data collection, storage, analysis and visualization. We first identify the drivers of such software projects and identify different types of geographic information software, e.g. Desktop GIS, Remote Sensing software, Serve...

We present a reproducible method to analyze the state of software development practices in a given scientific domain and apply this method to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The analysis is based on grading a set of 30 GIS products using a template of 56 questions based on 13 software qualities. The products range in scope and purpose from a complete desktop GIS systems, to stand-alone to...

Open Source Web GIS software systems have reached a stage of maturity, sophistication, robustness and stability, and usability and user friendliness rivalling that of commercial, proprietary GIS and Web GIS server products. The Open Source Web GIS community is also actively embracing OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards, including WMS (Web Map Service). WMS enables the creation of Web map...

Figure 5: Data modeling from the real world to a database, and from there to digital cartographic models and analogue products for visualization.. Figure 20: Sample (a) region, (b) its binary array, (c) its maximal blocks, and (d) the corresponding quadtree (after SAMET 1990a). IX he first textbook on GIS was published in 1986. Today, we can find dozens of books dealing with GIS. Yet, it is dif...

Accessibility indices which measure the relative `nearness' or `propinquity' of geographic locations, one to another, are not well-developed functions in proprietary geographic information systems (GIS), notwithstanding their evident usefulness for urban analysis. In this paper, we develop procedures for embedding such measures within desktop GIS, focusing on the measurement of geometric access...