Integration of 3D Geoscientific Visualisation Tools with help of a Geo-Database Kernel 1

Visualisation and the handling of large data sets are key issues in the workflow of many applications in today’s life and engineering sciences. However, from a software and data engineering point of view, these two important services are often located in two separated, i.e. independent and closed software systems. This means that the exchange of data and operations between software systems, i.e. the visualisation of database queries and the storage of visualised objects in the database management system, respectively, are not well integrated into many applications systems. We present an open CORBA-based system architecture that connects two existing geoscientific software tools – the geological 3D modelling and visualisation tool GOCAD 2 and the geophysical 3D modelling tool IGMAS 3 – via a 3D Geo-Database kernel, GeoToolKit 4 . The common geo-scientific objects in the database can be accessed from GOCAD and IGMAS. The advantage of this method is that the 3D modelling tools can remotely access not only data but also the 3D advanced geometric database operations of GeoToolKit. Moreover, using the standard middleware platform we make the database and data also accessible for other applications. We report about our experience of the implementation with ObjectStore ODBMS and a CORBA/ODBMS adapter. Implementation aspects and open problems are discussed. 1 Motivation The necessity of an interconnection between geoscientific modelling software and database systems is recognised and accepted since many years. Nevertheless, the integration of geoscientific modelling applications and databases, allowing a direct access from the modelling software onto the database system and vice versa, is not a standard within geoscientific applications. Usually, not only one geoscientific application, but also varieties of applications are used for modelling, validation or visualisation of a specific area. Therefore, each of these applications interacts with each other by the exchange of data. The storage and management of all these data in separate files is a common method, though it is hazardous. At this, small scripts have to be written to convert a data set from one application to another. The representation of data 1 This work is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the collaborative research centre SFB350 at Bonn University and the joint project ”Interoperable geo-scientific information systems”. 2 GOCAD - geological 3D modelling tool. http://www.ensg.u-nancy.fr/GOCAD/