First steps towards an interoperable GIS - an example from southern lower Saxony

In geosciences the necessity of combining geological and geophysical inform ation as well, as applying tools for designing 3D geological and geophysica l models is well accepted. Nevertheless, in most cases this demand is only put into practice by file transfer between the applications. The creation o f a common 3D model is complicated by the inflexible handling of new and re interpreted data and by changing applications, heterogeneous operating syst ems and/or hardware platforms. We present a new approach for a component ba sed GIS which is coupled with an object oriented database management system . The original data, as well as the derived data and the 3D models, are sto red in the extensible database. Geological and geophysical 3D modeling tool s have direct access to the database via the Common Object Request Broker A rchitecture (CORBA). By this means, we obtained both the integration of the software components and independence from changing software applications a nd changing platforms, finally resulting in an interoperable 3D GIS. (C) 19 99 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.