The Open GIS Consortium (OGC) has proposed a standard for the software architecture of geographic information systems (GIS) in order to enable interoperability among different GIS products. The so-called Abstract Model does not support spatial constraints yet, although most of the later proposals of GIS conceptual data models already do. This paper presents an extension of OGC’s Abstract Model ...

Over the past few decades GIS and statistical spatial data analysis tools have been successfully applied in the fields of meteorology, environmental monitoring, ecological analysis, and mineral exploration (to name but a few). While these synergistic tools operate on spatial data, as yet they have not been incorporated into a single 'user-friendly' software environment. For this reason statisti...

BACKGROUND Despite the demonstrated utility of GIS for health applications, there are perceived problems in low resource settings: GIS software can be expensive and complex; input data are often of low quality. This study aimed to test the appropriateness of new, inexpensive and simple GIS tools in poorly resourced areas of a developing country. GIS applications were trialled in pilot studies b...

Cutting-edge tourism portals have to integrate GIS information. However, GIS data formats differ from usual tourism portal data formats. In this paper we propose a web application architecture which uses GIS as a main information resource and therefore diverges from standard web application architectures. GIS data as well as relational data is wrapped into XML and processed by an XSLT processor...

The world of GIS is always in development, and this fact is particularly true for Open Source GIS. Among the GIS software, in the last years GRASS GIS has known wide popularity as it is well documented by the recent GRASS Users conferences, both at national and international levels and the incoming ones. The creativity and fantasy of the researchers together with the freedom of the source code ...

From Information Highway, Spatial Information Infrastructure (SDI) to Digital Earth, the requirement from the user raised new chances and challenges to GIS software. As a part of Digital Earth, the core of Digital China is SDI of the country and that of all levels of administrative regions. This paper discusses the requirement of GIS software system for the construction of SDIs of China in deta...

GRASS is a well-known geographic information system developed more than 30 years ago. As one of the earliest GIS systems, GRASS has currently survived mainly as free, open-source desktop GIS software, with users primarily limited to the research community or among programmers who use it to create customized functions. To allow average GIS end users to continue taking advantage of this widely-us...

For about two decades remote sensing (RS) data in the form of multi-spectral air photography, ground based weather radar as well as geostationary and polar orbiting satellite data have been available for use in hydrology. It is the intention of this paper to advocate the use of RS data in the field of hydrological modelling. It is shown that the main field of application of RS data in hydrologi...