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Abstract
The Design of Integrated GIS Development Toolkit
Pai-Hui Hsu
Associate Research Fellow
National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction,
Taiwan
Email: hsuph@ntu.edu.tw
Fong-Gee Yiu
Department of Civil Engineering
Lan Yang Institute of Technology
Email: gee@mail.fit.edu.tw
Liang-Hwei Lee
Department of Civil Engineering
National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences
Email: lhlee@cc.kuas.edu.tw
Tzu-Hsiao Weng
Yenom Soft Tech Company
The Geographic Information System (GIS) can be defined as a computer system capable of capturing, storing, analyzing, and displaying geographically referenced information. In the past, GIS tools and methods have been successfully used in the applications of environmental studies, geography, geology, planning, business marketing, and other disciplines. A general GIS should include the procedures, operating personnel, and spatial data that go into the system. However, sometimes the capability and functions of the procedures provided by commercial GIS software do not satisfy the requests of the operating personnel for some special applications. Therefore, a superior developer environment for building custom applications using multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) will be a very important factor to evaluate the system extendable and custom-made capability of a modern GIS system. In this paper, a component-based GIS system, called INET GIS software, based on the object oriented programming model is introduced. The INET GIS software consists of five key parts: Desktop GIS viewer, Internet Map Server (IMS), Spatial Database Server (SDS), Data Cache Server (DCS) and Development Kits (SDKs). A developer can build custom-made applications using the Component Object Model (COM) compliant objects and .NET framework class libraries provided by the Development Kits of INET GIS software. A key feature of this system is that it provides the capability to support different category applications using the same functionality in Desktop GIS viewer, IMS, 3D IMS, SDE, and PDA GIS systems. For example, the functionality of Desktop GIS viewer and IMS can be extended using the same APIs via VB .NET or VBScripts language. Compared with the commercial GIS software, the INET GIS has the capability of managing and displaying the massive image and vector data rapidly with the spatial database in the Internet. Furthermore, the INET GIS system also provides full functionality SDK for enterprise developers to design GIS-centric applications. According to the users’ experiences, it is very easy to employ rapid development of desktop or web-based GIS-centric applications by using the SDK or VBA libraries embedded in the INET GIS system. The potential applications are either for personal or for enterprise, such as Very-High-Resolution satellite images database management system, 3D terrain fly-through web page, or web-based spatial analysis applications. Keywords: GIS SDKs, Component-Based GIS, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
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