Integration of a 2D legacy GIS, legacy simulations, and legacy databases into a 3D geographic simulation

Legacy application systems have been widely used by user communities, and by individual users. They are currently providing a variety of functions required by system development requirements. For the development of a new 3D system using such legacy systems, we need both (i) the migration of legacy systems into a new 3D system environment, and (ii) interoperations among these systems. This paper proposes a framework for the ad hoc integration of a 2D legacy GIS, legacy simulators, and legacy databases, which are not a priori assumed to be integrated with each other. For this purpose, we first propose a mechanism to migrate a 2D legacy system with its GUI into a 3D environment. This mechanism is based on a special coordinate transformation for both the texture mapping and the event dispatching. It enables us to use a 3D terrain model with a shadow copy of a 2D legacy GIS. As for legacy geographic simulators and legacy databases without any GUI, we provide them with their proxy objects. These proxy objects can interoperate with each other, and also with the shadow copy of a 2D legacy GIS through their slot connections. As a result, our approach enables us to dynamically integrate multiple independent legacy simulators and/or legacy databases with a 2D legacy GIS simply through the composition of their 3D display objects

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