Research Article: Dynamic run-time application development using CORBA objects and XML in the field of distributed GIS

IPODLAS—A software architecture for coupling temporal simulation systems, VR, and GIS

“…The modules are determined by high cohesion within the module and low coupling between the modules (Ghezzi et al, 2003). They expose their interfaces and hide their implementation (Preston et al, 2003). The resulting reduction of the communication load between subsystems limits the dependencies between the individual subsystems and therefore supports their interchangeability.…”

“…The addition of a mediating layer is fundamental for 3-tiered architectures such as CORBA 1 (OMG, 1999). The coupling of different GIS or DBMS (Bergmann et al, 2000a,b;Preston et al, 2003) are integration examples from within the GIS domain, the mediation-based framework of Yates and Bishop (1997) and the layered architecture of Bernhard and Krueger (2000) integrates modeling systems and GIS. XML-based languages are used to capture not only formats but also to describe semantics of the information exchanged (Bergmann et al, 2000b;Preston et al, 2003).…”

“…The key concepts used by GML to model the world are drawn from the OpenGIS Abstract Specification (OGC, 1999) and the ISO 19100 series (ISO/TC, 2004). The use of GML is expected to lead to greater interoperability between applications within the GIS world and to facilitate data sharing (Preston et al, 2003). With the advent of GML 3.0 (OGC, 2003) the use of temporal information and dynamic features is supported, i.e.…”

“…With the advent of GML 3.0 (OGC, 2003) the use of temporal information and dynamic features is supported, i.e. there are structures to store and transport temporal information (Preston et al, 2003). A major disadvantage of XML-type languages is the inflated data volume due to additional metadata and the use of a text-based format for encoding binary data.…”

“…These spatially oriented systems lack the ability to represent temporal dynamics and their concepts of landscape are static (Peuquet and Niu, 1995). GIS are very large systems tending to be monolithic, and therefore costly to combine with other systems (Preston et al, 2003). On the other hand, temporal simulation systems (TSS) support the simulation of static and in particular dynamic dependencies.…”