The Design and Implementation of a Reusable Viewer Component

This article outlines the capabilities of a viewer component called GridViewer, and proves its reusability. GridViewer was designed for the construction of the image display part of GIS or remote sensing application software, and consequently it is particularly straightforward to closely couple GridViewer with access to very large images. Displaying is performed through pyramid structure, which enables to treat very large dataset up to several gigabytes in size under the limited capability of PC. GridViewer is free from responsibility to handle various formats of raster data files by taking grid coverage, which is designed by OGC to promote interoperability between implementations done by data vendors and software vendors providing analysis and grid processing implementations. GridViewer differs from other such viewer by allowing for clients to extend its function and capability by using small set of methods originally implemented in it. We show its reusability and expandability by applying it in developing application programs performing various functions not supported originally by the GridViewer COM component.