VGEs-oriented multi-sourced heterogeneous spatial data integration

Abstract

The world of today heavily relies on spatial data to manage the natural and built environments, also to construct virtual geographic environments (VGEs). After analyzed the characteristics of multi-sourced heterogeneous spatial data in VGEs, a Data Representation Model oriented to VGEs (XGE-DRM) was designed in this paper. The XGE-DRM provides not only a clear description of the data, but also defines the relationships among the data, it is critical for users to interpret data correctly. XGE-DRM provides a common data model to define a data representation structure for traditional data and spatial data. Using it, users can customize their geographic data to correctly interpret other data. Then the processes and framework of multi-sourced heterogeneous spatial data integration were proposed, and the spatial data parsing was discussed. Lastly, the platform system of multi-sourced heterogeneous spatial data integration was designed and developed under the VS.NET2005 development environment combined with XML technology, and it can solve the bottleneck problems arise in geographic information resources which under the heterogeneous environment. Some experiments were designed and discussed, by those experiments; it had shown that the platform we developed can integrate multi-sourced heterogeneous spatial data effectively and were works better than other similar platform systems.