First steps towards an interoperable GIS -: an example from southern lower Saxony

In geosciences the necessity of combining geological and geophysical information as well, as applying tools for designing 3D geological and geophysical models is well accepted. Nevertheless, in most cases this demand is only put into practice by file transfer between the applications. The creation of a common 3D model is complicated by the inflexible handling of new and reinterpreted data and by changing applications, heterogeneous operating systems and/or hardware platforms. We present a new approach for a component based GIS which is coupled with an object oriented database management system. The original data, as well as the derived data and the 3D models, are stored in the extensible database. Geological and geophysical 3D modeling tools have direct access to the database via the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). By this means, we obtained both the integration of the software components and independence from changing software applications and changing platforms, finally resulting in an interoperable 3D GIS. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.