Extending GeoToolKit to Access Distributed Spatial Data and Operations O. Balovnev, M. Breunig, A. Cremers, and S. Shumilov   View Paper (PDF)   Return to SHORT PAPERS Abstract The integration of extremely heterogeneous geo-scientific data is a challenging problem. To provide a non-redundant maintenance and cooperative utilization of data by different applications developed within the interdisciplinary geo-scientific research center at the University of Bonn we elaborated a technology based on GeoToolKit - a component-based software development tool. In the paper, we present GeoToolKit extensions required to deal with distributed heterogeneous spatial data sources. They involve metadata-level structures and methods that encourage a convenient navigation in multiple distributed data sources and smart assembling of appropriate data into local task-specific configurations. The proposed extensions can be beneficial for the development of special-purpose applications and rather general data browsers capable to deal with a wide range of geo-scientific data. In addition, they are likely to be helpful in the creation of geo-scientific warehouses and in the development of exploratory applications, which usually need the access to distributed data sources. Finally, CORBA-based architectural extensions of GeoToolKit to provide data and operation transfer are presented and evaluated with real geo-scientific applications. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management (SSDBM'00) DiSC'01 Copyright ©2002 ACM Inc.