19 June 2001
DISTRIBUTING MAPPING OBJECTS WITH THE GEOSPATIAL INFORMATION DATABASE
M. Chung
R. Wilson K. Shaw
Naval Research Laboratory
Stennis Space Center, MS 39529-5004
M. Cobb
University of Southern Mississippi
Hattiesburg, MS 39406-5106
Abstract
The Geospatial Information Database (GIDB) is an implementation of on going research in object-oriented geographic data modeling at the Naval Research Laboratory's Mapping, Charting & Geodesy Branch. The GIDB has evolved over the last five years from the initial memory-resident application involving vector mapping data, to the current state-of-the-art system of a distributed object-oriented database with web-based viewing capabilities for vector, raster, hypertext and multimedia data, as well as remote updating of vector data.
The use of geographic data is becoming pervasive across many disciplines. At the same time, end users are becoming increasingly dependent upon the web as a source of readily available, easily accessible information. We believe these two factors necessitate the development of systems capable of the immediate distribution and access to complex spatial data objects. The GIDB was designed and developed to till this need. The evolution of the GIDB required many supporting technologies, including a commercial object-oriented database management system, appropriate middleware (CORBA 2.0 object request brokers) and, of course, object-oriented programming languages. In this paper, we present the design strategies and implementation architecture of the GIDB and show how these can be used as a model for distributed geographic information systems.
Sponsored by the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory and the National Imagery
and Mapping Agency as part of the Urban Warrior Advanced Warfighting Experiment.
Presented to
DOA 99 (Distributed Objects/Applications, 5-6 Sept 1999, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Naval Research Laboratory Contribution Number NRL/PP/7441 99-0002.
Conference Proceedings