Building geo-scientific applications on top of GeoToolKit: a case study of data integration

Today's geo-information systems are historically grown products which are hardly extensible to meet the requirements imposed by 3D/4D-modeling. The next generation GISs should benefit from modern software engineering technologies. A component-based design encourages a fast "assembly" of applications from high-level software building blocks. Following this approach a complex general-purpose geo-information system can be substituted by a family of specialized subsystems which due to the common design basis are open for mutual data exchange. We introduce GeoToolKit component software intended for the development of 3D/4D geo-scientific applications. We also present our experience in building different types of geo-scientific applications on top of GeoToolKit. We show that common data types inherited by diverse applications from the GeoToolKit spatial class hierarchy create an excellent basis for the database-level integration of heterogeneous geo-scientific data.