DO-GIS - a distributed and object oriented GIS

This paper reports “first cut” of the design of a distributed and object oriented geographic information system, DO-GIS, under development at I.I.T. Delhi. The paper deals with data model, architecture, query processing and data management in a GIS. Considering that geographical data includes information about spatial reference frame, topological connections and requires maintenance of physically distributed spatial data, we argue that a distributed and object oriented GIS is the most natural choice for both data processing and management. The distribution of data (over a set of sites) has implications on the query processing, i.e. it requires query partitioning and distributed processing. DO-GIS architecture employs meta database and order preserving protocols to make both the distributed query processing and subsequent collation of partial results totally transparent to the user. Overall the operation is in the spirit of co-operative computing paradigm.