Implementation of a geospatial imagery digital library using Java and CORBA

We have implemented a prototype distributed system for managing and accessing a digital library of geospatial imagery over a wide-area network. The system conforms to a subset of the Geospatial and Imagery Access Services (GIAS) specification from the U.S. National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), which defines an object-oriented application programming interface (API) using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) for remote access to the image server. The GIAS specification is being explored by the military in both the U.S. and Australia as a means for creating widely accessible imagery repositories, and also provides a convenient API for interfacing to repositories of geospatial images, such as satellite data archives, for a variety of commercial and research applications. Our prototype GIAS implementation was developed using StudioCentral from Silicon Graphics Inc., which provides a set of C++ class libraries for building digital multimedia repositories. We discuss the issues and problems involved in developing this system using CORBA, Java and C++ native methods, within the constraints of the GIAS specification.