Over the last few years the world of free and open source geospatial software has experienced some major changes. For instance, the website FreeGIS.org currently lists 330 GIS related projects. Besides the advent of new software projects and the growth of established projects, a new organisation known as the OSGeo Foundation has been established to offer a point of contact. This paper will give...

Nowadays, there are many attempts to establish object-oriented GIS in some software However, they are not accordant to object-oriented concept whole and systematically in the whole course from the process of cognizing and abstracting geographical space to the process of defining and describing GIS data model then to the process of analyzing and designing GIS. Especially, the research on common ...

This paper establishes an architecture for global user interfaces by defining appropriate user tasks and designing an agent-based interface mechanism for distributed geographic information services. User tasks include query, display, data integration, and GIS processing functions. The use of intelligent agents is justified in the context of increasing geospatial data volume, increasing complexi...

The advantages of ‘Distributed GIS’ have long been realised by GIS practitioners and researchers, for its strengths of system flexibility, reliability, scalability, processing efficiency and resources sharing. However, due to the complex network architecture and software structure, current distributed GIS (DGIS) still cannot fully accommodate distributed, heterogeneous and speedy development in...