The Development of the Open Desktop GIS S/W on Windows 95/98 Platform

Abstract

A new trend of developing GIS S/Ws is based on Open System Environment on which the standards of ISO/TC 211 and OpenGIS are established. In order to have the competitiveness of GIS client S/Ws, we need to develop the open GIS compliant client S/W which can be used as the client tools interoperable to different GIS servers or as the stand-alone desktop GIS S/W. The fundamental technologies of implementing the open desktop GIS S/W are the Client-Server Communication Protocol, Client Development API and the Data Provider for GIS servers.

In this work, we have developed the prototype of the open Desktop GIS S/W on windows 95/98 environments, which is named as the MapWorld Client. To support to develop GIS applications, we also developed the MapWorld Client API. To realize the interoperability of the MapWorld Client over different data sources, we have designed and implemented the geographic data server which wraps the different servers. The main contributions of this work are as follow:

- The design of the reference model for a client-server GIS architecture interoperable to different GIS servers.
- The development of the Data Provider for supporting interoperability.
- The development of materialization and consistency control techniques of spatial view for developing the GIS client S/W, which also can be used as the stand-alone Desktop GIS.
- The development of the cache replacement strategies and cache coherence schemes for maintaining the cached spatial data consistent.
- The development of the techniques of spatial data transmission between a GIS server and its clients.