GIS@development September 2003: "Characteristics of a highly interoperable GIS"

Over the last 20 years the application of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology has matured from stand-alone departmental implementations typically operated directly by application domain specialists, to the enterprise computing environment managed by IT professionals and used by a wider range of users. This maturation was not achieved in isolation; rather the rapid advances in information technology over the last 20 years have been the major driving factor. No longer do we see organizations with one mother-ship mainframe hosting all of the enterprise applications, now we are more likely to see a federation of networked systems each one configured to best suit the needs of specific host applications and interoperating via industry standard protocols with other systems inside or outside the organization as required by the business rules of the organization.

Today the focus is on the integration of spatial data and analysis within the mission- critical business processes and work flows of the enterprise and on increasing the return on investment (ROI) in GIS technology and databases by improving interoperability, decision-making, and service delivery.

One of the key catalysts for the advancement of information technology has been the development of networks and the Internet allowing systems to communicate by some pre- determined protocols and data format/access standards. In order for these inter- application communications to be successful, industry standards organizations have come into existence to "negotiate" and publish requirements and specifications for implementation by software vendors and system integrators. Some of these organizations are listed below:

ISO	International Organizations for Standardization OGC Open GIS Consortium
W3C	World Wide Web Consortium
ANSI	American National Standards Institute
IHO	International Hydrographic Organization
WS-I	Web Services Interoperability Organization LIF Location Interoperability Forum
WLIA	Wireless Location Industry Association FGDC Federal Geographic Data Committee
GSDI	Global Spatial Data Infrastructure
CEN	European Committee for Standardization
DGIWG	Digital Geographic Information Working group

For GIS vendors it is absolutely critical that they anticipate, participate in, and implement the industry defined interoperability standards to ensure the development of software that is relevant to industry needs.

The purpose of this paper is to review the development of GIS interoperability over the last 20 years and provide some insight into what are the characteristics of a highly interoperable GIS now, and what they are likely to be in the future.

What Makes an Open GIS
Over the years advances in information technology -hardware, storage, network, performance, standards, etc, have provided a moving target for what the term Open GIS means. As such we see a number a ~owing number of interoperability strategies over time:

Data Conversion of proprietary formats (DGN, DWG etc)
Export/Import support for Standard Interchange Formats (SDTS, GML, etc) .Direct Data Access of Open File Formats (Shape, VPF, etc)
Direct Data Access using published Application pro~amming Interfaces (OGC Simple Features for OLE/COM)
Common features in a Database Management System (OGC Simple Features for SQL)
Inte~ation of standardized GIS Web Services (OGC Web Map Service and Web Feature Service)

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