Spatial Clearinghouse Components for OpenGIS Data Providers

Recently, the necessity of accessing spatial data from remote computer via network has been increased as distributed spatial data have been increased due to their size and cost. Many methods have been used in recent years for transferring spatial data, such as socket, CORBA, HTTP, RPC, FTP, etc. In this paper, we propose spatial clearinghouse components to access distributed spatial data sources via CORBA and Internet. The spatial clearinghouse components are defined as OLE/COM components that enable users to access spatial data that meet their requests from remote computer. For reusability, we design the spatial clearinghouse with UML and implement it as a set of components. In order to enhance interoperability among different platforms in distributed computing environment, we adopt international standards and open architecture such as CORBA, HTTB, and OpenGIS Simple Features Specifications. There are two kinds of spatial clearinghouse: CORBA-based spatial clearinghouse and Internet-based spatial clearinghouse. The CORBA-based spatial clearinghouse supports COM-CORBA bridge to access spatial data from remote data providers that satisfy the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification for OLE/COM using COM and CORBA interfaces. The Internet-based spatial clearinghouse provides Web-service components to access spatial data from remote data providers using Web-browser.