Geotoolkit: Opening Access to Object-Oriented Geodata Stores

Today a typical geographic information system (GIS) is a complex software package which inevitably inherits the software-engineering practices of the past. Application programming within such systems is extremely complicated. Data structures and functions are often completely hidden from the user. As a result, they are hardly extensible to meet the requirements imposed, for instance, by 3D and 4D modeling. The next generation GIS should benefit from modern software engineering technologies, among which one of the most promising is component-based design. Software building organized in libraries with consistent programming interfaces will enable the fast assembly of special-purpose applications for particular domains. An application-specific component can be customized and re-used (with necessary extensions and modifications, if required) for the development of related applications. Following this approach, today’s general-purpose GIS will be replaced by a family of specialized sub-systems which, due to their common design basis, are well suited for inter-communication and mutual data exchange.