NCGIA Initiative
20
Interoperating Geographic Information Systems
Funding Agency:
National Science Foundation
Initiative Co-Leaders:
Initiative Summary
The field of system design and implementation is at the verge of
enabling a completely new paradigm. Rather than making an a priori
decision about what functionality to incorporate into a piece of
software, an open environment would allow users to combine
components (functions or processes) in an ad-hoc manner. This
provides users not only great flexibility, but also allows them to
focus on the particular tasks they want to perform. Furthermore, it
enables consistency as users can use their favorite components for
any task, independent of what application they are running.
Complementary to the industry's activities in Open GIS, this
research initiative will investigate issues of semantic
interoperability for GISs. Spatial data models must be compatible,
or need knowledge of how to negociate to become compatible, in
order to work together.
Objectives
- Compare different alternatives to current GIS architectures
that would allow for open, distributed access to geographic
information.
- Develop new methodologies (in addition to conventional data
exchange standards, metadata, and data dictionaries) that will
better capture the semantics and linguistic/cultural
particularities of geographic information.
- Design abstract, high-level spatial data models and process
models, suitable for an open architecture, using terrain as a data
type for a case study.
- Study the properties of operations on geographic data and
evaluate their performance through cost-models in a
distributed/modular environment.
- Examine how an open GIS architecture will make the use of GISs
easier for scientists.
NCGIA organized the first international conference on
Interoperating Geographic Information Systems in Santa Barbara, CA,
December 1997.
Powerpoint
slides from presentation at the AAG 1999.
Last updated on March 5, 1999.
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[ Department of Spatial
Information Science and Engineering | University of Maine ]