First Steps Towards an Interoperable 3D GIS
An Example From Southern Lower Saxony, Germany

M. Breunig¹, A.B. Cremers¹, H.-J. Goetze²,
S. Schmidt², R. Seidemann³, S. Shumilov¹, A. Siehl³

¹ Dept. of Computer Science III, University of Bonn, Germany
² FR Geophysik, FU Berlin, Germany
³ Dept. of Geology, University of Bonn, Germany

Abstract

In geosciences the necessity of combining geological and geophysical information as well as applying tools for designing 3D models is well accepted. Nevertheless, in most cases this demand is only put into practice by file transfer between the applications. Therefore the creation of a 3D model is aggravated by the inflexibility for handling additional or re-interpreted data and for the treatment of changing applications, operation systems and/or platforms.

To improve the first aspect, an object oriented database system (OODB) is developed, wherein the original data as well as the derived data and the 3D models are stored. Geo-applications have direct access to the OODB by utilizing the technology of common object request broker architecture (CORBA). Hereby integration of the software components and independence from both changing software applications and changing platforms are obtained, finally resulting in an InterOperable 3D GIS (IOGIS).

We present an example of the exchange of spatial objects between a geological and a geophysical software application using CORBA's interface definition language (IDL) as an integrated approach of geological and geophysical 3D modeling in southern Lower Saxony.

This work is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the program of the research group 'Interoperable Geoscientific Information System (IOGIS)', and the research grant Schm 844/4.
We acknowledge the receipt of industry data from various german oil companies which are active in the southern part of the Northwest German Basin.