Design of service-oriented architecture for spatial data integration and its application in building web-based GIS systems

In this paper we propose a service-oriented architecture for spatial data integration (SOA-SDI) in the context of a large number of available spatial data sources that are physically sitting at different places, and develop web-based GIS systems based on SOA-SDI, allowing client applications to pull in, analyze and present spatial data from those available spatial data sources. The proposed architecture logically includes 4 layers or components; they are layer of multiple data provider services, layer of data integration, layer of backend services, and front-end graphical user interface (GUI) for spatial data presentation. On the basis of the 4-layered SOA-SDI framework, WebGIS applications can be quickly deployed, which proves that SOA-SDI has the potential to reduce the input of software development and shorten the development period.