Interoperating Geographic Information Systems
Interoperating Geographic Information Systems

Author: Michael Goodchild

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 1461551897

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Geographic information systems have developed rapidly in the past decade, and are now a major class of software, with applications that include infrastructure maintenance, resource management, agriculture, Earth science, and planning. But a lack of standards has led to a general inability for one GIS to interoperate with another. It is difficult for one GIS to share data with another, or for people trained on one system to adapt easily to the commands and user interface of another. Failure to interoperate is a problem at many levels, ranging from the purely technical to the semantic and the institutional. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is about efforts to improve the ability of GISs to interoperate, and has been assembled through a collaboration between academic researchers and the software vendor community under the auspices of the US National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis and the Open GIS Consortium Inc. It includes chapters on the basic principles and the various conceptual frameworks that the research community has developed to think about the problem. Other chapters review a wide range of applications and the experiences of the authors in trying to achieve interoperability at a practical level. Interoperability opens enormous potential for new ways of using GIS and new mechanisms for exchanging data, and these are covered in chapters on information marketplaces, with special reference to geographic information. Institutional arrangements are also likely to be profoundly affected by the trend towards interoperable systems, and nowhere is the impact of interoperability more likely to cause fundamental change than in education, as educators address the needs of a new generation of GIS users with access to a new generation of tools. The book concludes with a series of chapters on education and institutional change. Interoperating Geographic Information Systems is suitable as a secondary text for graduate level courses in computer science, geography, spatial databases, and interoperability and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

Spatial Database Transfer Standards 2: Characteristics for Assessing Standards and Full Descriptions of the National and International Standards in the World
Spatial Database Transfer Standards 2: Characteristics for Assessing Standards and Full Descriptions of the National and International Standards in the World

Author: H. Moellering

Publisher: Elsevier

Published: 1997-07-03

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 0080541526

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This book represents five and a half years of work by the ICA Commission on Standards for the Transfer of Spatial Data during the 1991- 95 ICA cycle. The effort began with the Commission working to develop a set of scientific characteristics by which every kind of spatial data transfer standard could be understood and assessed. This implies that every facet of the transfer process must be understood so that the scientific characteristics could be most efficiently specified. The members of the Commission spent hours looking at their own standard and many others, to ascertain how to specify most effectively the characteristic or subcharacteristic in question. The result is a set of internationally agreed scientific characteristics with 13 broad primary level classes of characteristics, 85 secondary characteristics, and about 220 tertiary characteristics that recognizes almost every possible capability that a spatial data transfer standard might have. It is recognized that no one standard possesses all of these characteristics, but contains a subset of these characteristics. However, these characteristics have been specified in such a way to facilitate understanding of individual standards, and use by interested parties of making comparisons for their own purposes. Although individual applications of a standard may be for different purposes, this set of characteristics provides a uniform measure by which the various standards may be assessed. The book presents an Introduction and four general chapters that describe the spatial data transfer standards activities happening in Europe, North America, Asia/Pacific, and the ISO community. This provides the context so the reader can more easily understand the scientific and technical framework from which a particular standard has come. The third section is a complete listing of all of the three levels of characteristics and their meaning by the inclusion of a set of definitions for terms used in the book. The fourth section, and by far the largest, contains 22 chapters that assess each of the major national and international spatial data transfer standards in the world in terms of all three levels of characteristics. Each assessment has been done by a Commission member who has been an active participant in the development of the standard being assessed in the native language of that standard. A cross-table chart is also provided.