Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have long bridged the gap between geo-information databases and applications. Although conceptual modelling approaches for GIS have been particularly successful in the representation of the specific properties of geographical information, there is still a need for a better integration of user intentions and usage. This paper introduces a conceptual framewo...

Geographic information systems (GIS) are becoming more usual due to the improved performance of computer systems. GIS applications are being developed using the three-tier software architecture traditionally used for generalpurpose information systems. Even though this architecture is suitable for GIS applications, the special nature and exclusive characteristics of geographic information pose ...

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely used in different domains of applications, such as maritime navigation, museums visits and route planning, as well as ecological, demographical and economical applications. Nowadays, organizations need sophisticated and adapted GIS-based Decision Support System (DSS) to get quick access to relevant information and to analyze data with respect to g...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss research directions in GIS. In doing so I will deliberately broaden the meaning of "GIS" to include a wide range of activities within the broad rubric of digital geographic information, since it seems to me that "GIS" is now generally used in that broad sense, rather than in the narrower sense of a software system designed specifically to store, retrieve,...

A bibliometric analysis was applied in this work to evaluate global scientific production of geographic information system (GIS) papers from 1997 to 2006 in any journal of all the subject categories of the Science Citation Index compiled by Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Philadelphia, USA. ‘GIS’ and ‘geographic information system’ were used as keywords to search parts of titles, ab...

As GIS implementations mature and GIS use expands beyond the current core GIS community the need to discover and disseminate GIS capabilities grows. The Internet and the age of distributed computing provide the technical framework on which distributed GIS is built. As key application of distributed GIS, geoportals provide a gateway to discover and access geographic Web services. Four key geopor...

In general, Geographical Information System (GIS) has four main components, namely data input, data model, data analysis and manipulation, and data presentation. These components are vital in order to make GIS fully functional. This paper is centred upon the research activities of selecting, synthesis, designing and implementing the data model components. The primary research issue is to develo...

In this position paper we discuss the evolution of an object-oriented framework for GIS applications into a platform for dealing with mobile users and geographic objects. We first motivate our research by discussing the state of the art of mobile GIS applications, the so-called location-based services using a simple scenario. We briefly describe an object-oriented architecture for dealing with ...

Many elements of ancient Maya culture — language, art, ecology, economics, politics — have a geographic aspect and can be profitably investigated through geographic analysis. We are developing a geographic information system (GIS) for the purpose of studying prehistoric Maya settlement and society. The GIS is composed of archaeological, epigraphic, and locational data. It includes the whole May...

In this paper we present an object-oriented approach for designing GIS applications; it combines well known software engineering practices with the use of design patterns as a conceptual tool to cope with recurrent problems appearing in the GIS domain. Our approach allows the designer to decouple the conceptual de®nition of application objects from their spatial representation. In this way, GIS...