The Role of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in Modeling of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Abstract

The popularity of Geographic Information System (GIS) has grown tremendously such that software developers can no longer neglect that sector when fashioning out new technologies for software development. The concept of Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has revolutionalised software development industry including the GIS and software modeling in general. This paper reveals how the concepts inherent in Object- Oriented Programming Languages (OOPLs) can be deployed to model a GIS software. Using materials from secondary sources and adopting a case study method, the paper unraveled the desirable features of GIS software with a view to determining the relevance of OOP in GIS modeling. Furthermore, current GIS Modeling software features were critically studied and were found to imbibe several OOP techniques and concepts. A GIS software, ArcGIS was used as a case study to reveal that GIS software models have close affinity with OOP implementation languages like C++, Java, C#. The paper concluded that OOP concepts indeed were very relevant in GIS modeling, even though some GIS related problems still needed to be fully tackled by existing software.