Towards the Design and Development of a New Architecture for Geographic Information Systems

Existing Geographic Information Systems lack many impor-tant features such as the ability to model the real world more adequately and facilities for logical deduction and ge-ometric computation. In this paper, we study the structure and behavior of existing Geographic Information Systems, isolate their drawbacks and explore the applicability of ob-ject oriented design, logical deduction and hypermedia to developing better and more efficient geographic information systems. In particular, we focus on the concept, design and development of an architecture for the next generation ge-ographic information systems, which will be able to access, synthesize and reason about large volumes of geographic in-formation more efficiently and effectively, without sacrificing functionality, extensibility and consistency. Of significance is the integration of many diverse forms of technological ad-vancements, including object oriented design, expert sys-tems and multi-media systems