Study on Opening Geospatial Database Connectivity

Abstract

With the fast development of GIS technology and improvement of the GIS application technology,higher requirements have been put forward to the spatial database connectivity and accessibility.This study first proposes a comparative analysis on cross-sectoral large-scale shared connection to spatial database,thus to point out the hard-to-achieve synchronization updating during different data types conversion.Direct data access model cannot be fully compliance with the data type updating.The spatial extension model of the relational database is dissatisfactory in performances as well as professional spatial analysis.The support of Web Service model is insufficient for non-standard spatial data types;the protocols provided by software providers are of great specificity and difficulty to be extended by third parties.Then in this article,the interfaces of heterogeneous databases connectivity are analyzed deeply.Currently there are two categories of interfaces which are the relational database access interfaces and spatial database standard interfaces.Based on the analysis,the article proposes the 'Opening Geospatial Database Connectivity(OGDC)' interfaces mechanism and specifications to provide a completely new model that a series of standard interfaces provided by several GIS platform software providers is jointly realized by database providers or data providers based on these standard interfaces.Detailed introductions are presented for the OGDC designs,technical features,implementation techniques,and applications.Finally,the feasibility and advantages of these proposed standards and specifications are demonstrated by a prototype using the OGDC from the domestic-developed distributed spatial database software 'BeyonDB'.And the prototype shows that OGDC could perfectly take account of the functionality,the efficiency and the usability of the spatial database connectivity,thus to provide a new application model for the standardized sharing and continual utilizing of the heterogeneous spatial database.