A Distributed Open Spatial Query Mechanism for Databases on the Web

The advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web have given rise to a wide variety of distributed applications, one being geographic information systems (GIS). Query and analysis are at the heart of GIS, but the heterogeneous environment of the WWW requires openness in terms of hardware and software. As a result a distributed open spatial query mechanism was designed to provide access to various GIS over the Internet. The design and implementation of the mechanism is discussed, and reasons for using Java, Java Native Interface (JNI) and Remote Method Invocation (RMI) in the implementation are explained. A Web Computing Skeleton was completed as part of our larger project and is incorporated into the implementation, thus allowing maximum flexibility for clients on the web. The article concludes with results from benchmarks that were conducted to confirm design and implementation decisions.