Chapter 3
GEOXYGENE: an Interoperable Platform for Geographical Application Development
3.1. Introduction
Geographical application development generates costs for research laboratories [BAD 03, BUC 11]. In spite of standardization efforts made by consortia such as ISO1 and OGC2, the different geographical models implemented in common GIS software do not allow for interoperable use of these models. The applications developed for one of these non-standard models are thus not necessarily reusable for applications based on a different model. Moreover, the programming languages used to develop applications relying on market GIS software are often “legacy” languages. Thus, sharing code becomes difficult and methods developed for one software have to be reimplemented in other software in order to be used. It is a time-consuming process for developers as well as for reseachers who have to learn new programming or GIS environments. These reasons were behind the decision of many laboratories to choose solutions that used free software. More specifically, the COGIT Laboratory of the IGN (French Mapping Agency) began in 2000 to develop the open source GEOXYGENE platform.
3.2. Background history
Originally designed between 2000 and 2004 by Thierry Badard and Arnaud Braun, then enriched by many researchers at the COGIT Laboratory, the GEOXYGENE platform's first release (1.0) was registered3 in 2005 under an LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License)4. Its main goal is to respond to and meet the ...
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