DESIGN AND FIRST STEPS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF OPALIS

Integrated access to the many heterogeneous and distributed sources of Geo data is an important precondition in order to facilitate the investigation of global processes like temporal development of ecosystems. The object oriented paleoecological information system OPALIS aims to support interoperability of various data sources. While retaining the advantages of local data maintenance and formats, it will provide uniform access to information by means of integrated queries and object oriented database views. In this paper, we present the component based architecture of OPALIS being designed to support extensibility and adaptability to future requirements. Furthermore, we describe the derivation of the relevant Geo domain knowledge used to guide the integration process as well as characterize the query types that will be supported in OPALIS.