INTEGRATION OF GIS AS A COMPONENT IN FEDERATED INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Claus Hofmann, Manuel Weindorf, Joachim Wiesel · 2000
Information systems are developing away from providing very specialized centralized solutions towards distributed systems based on the concept of services and objects. The main reasons for this new design paradigms are the possibility of coupling information systems to gain synergy effects, because many questions that need to be solved (e.g. in planning processes) are related to several different knowledge domains. Another reason is the possibility of spreading these information services into a broad public or user community by using internet techniques. In many fields (e.g. environmental information systems, traffic information systems, tourist information systems) geospatial data plays (or could play) a major role. Thus the integration of different systems and data sources in practice is a challenging task of the GIS community, because at the moment there exists a multitude of different data formats and monolithic GIS architectures. Each of them uses different data models and provides proprietary tools to access, manage and visualize the data. This fact handicaps the interoperability between GIS as well as the integration of geodata and GIS components into other application domains. This paper describes first structures and concepts of federated systems in general and further technical and implementation aspects of those component, middleware- and internet based techniques. To bring this concepts to practical applications at the IPF a special framework (named GIStermFramework) has been developed which offers generic GIS components that can be easily integrated into component based applications and internet based information system architectures. It is shown that GIS can be integrated into federated system scenarios by using middleware- and standard internet techniques like Java/RMI, Java/InfoBus and HTTP/HTML. This possibility is illustrated through an environmetal information system (EIS), which shows that as a result of the cooperation of basically heterogeneous systems users have advantages while integrating different knowledge domains.