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Working with GML for Internet GIS: User Perspective and Experience
Dongpo Deng
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica,
Taiwan
Email: dongpo@iis.sinica.edu.tw
With the proliferation of geospatial data over Internet, there is an increase in demand for efficient data integration solutions that allow interoperation of massive repositories of heterogeneous spatial data and metadata. GML (Geography Markup Language) is an XML based encoding language for geographic information developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Because GML is a standard for storing, transporting and modeling geospatial data, it has been considered as a solution of geospatial data interoperability. At the same time, with rich vocabulary and flexible document of GML, user providers can describe geospatial object from their own domain knowledge and share their wisdom. However, GML documents are often large in size and complicated in structure. It remains to be seen if GML can be used as a basis for internet GIS, where responsiveness is important for good user experience. There is a need to adapt existing XML techniques, or to develop new ones, to support GML-native geospatial operations.With increasing GML document, the issues how to integrate GML documents from different domain knowledge and efficiently retrieve GML document will be raised. In this paper, we will not only discuss pros and cons for GML, but also report experience in using GML for integrating heterogeneous geospatial datasets in building an internet GIS and propose a notion of GML-aware XML document processing.
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