A Generic Architecture for Geographic Information Systems

Geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming more usual due to the improved performance of computer systems. The traditional three-tier architecture for information systems is being used for the software architecture of GIS, but geographic information has some special qualities that make the use of the traditional architecture inappropriate. We analyze in this paper the special characteristics of geographic information, and we take them into account to propose a generic architecture for geographic information systems. The result is an efficient system architecture that can be easily adapted to specific applications. We also compare our architecture to the proposal of the OpenGIS Consortium, and we present a real-life geographic information system developed using commercial GIS development tools, and the architecture proposed in this paper. Finally, we analyze the impact that using commercial tools has on the system architecture.