Extending GeoToolKit to access distributed spatial data and operations

The integration of extremely heterogeneous geo-scientific data is a challenging problem. To provide a non-redundant maintenance and cooperative utilisation of data by different applications developed within the interdisciplinary geo-scientific research centre at the University of Bonn we elaborated a technology based on GeoToolKit-a component-based software development tool. In the paper we present GeoToolKit extensions required to deal with distributed heterogeneous spatial data sources. They involve metadata-level structures and methods that encourage a convenient navigation in multiple distributed data sources and smart assembling of appropriate data into local task-specific configurations. The proposed extensions can be beneficial for the development of special-purpose applications and rather general data browsers capable to deal with a wide range of geo-scientific data. Also they are likely to be helpful in the creation of geo-scientific warehouses and in the development of exploratory applications which usually need the access to distributed data sources. Finally CORBA-based architectural extensions of GeoToolKit to provide data and operation transfer are presented and evaluated with real geo-scientific applications.