Towards an Interoperable Open GIS

The number of geo-science applications has been ever increasing over the last decades. Most of them, however, do not provide required level of data and systems integration and tend to be architecturally closed, monolithic, and costly environments. In this paper we present our approach to design and development of an open component-based Geographical Information System (GIS) architecture. The overall goal is to make geo-data commonly accessible and usable for everyone and everywhere, by providing remote, prompt and effortless access to geo-data. The approach is evaluated by the development of a prototype. This contribution describes substantial components of the system, which supports the access to heterogeneous, distributed volume of data serving as an extensible communication backbone for inter-operating Geo-tools as well as an infrastructure for localization and integration of data sources. The presented Client/Server architecture supports extension in two dimensions: integration of new data sources as well as corresponding tools for their exploration and analysis. The benefits of the new approach for geo-scientists are manifold and related to an eased handling of data and the integration of geoscientific methods, all resulting in better validated models and consequently in more accurate and plausible results.