ESRI and SDSC collaborate on XML based GIS standardsSan Diego 14 February 2001 ESRI, a software provider for geographic information system (GIS) applications, agreed with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to develop more effective technologies to tie together the many different forms of geographic data used in fields ranging from science and engineering to conservation, government, and business. They will evaluate and contribute to standards for using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in GIS applications, and to ensure the compatibility of ESRI's widely used Arc eXtensible Markup Language (ArcXML) with other XML-based standards.
GIS involves computer-based tools for mapping and analyzing data that integrate common database operations such as query and statistical analysis with the visualization and geographic analysis benefits offered by maps. As vast volumes of different types of data come on-line, GIS applications are finding increasing uses because they allow researchers to analyze and display multiple data types on maps, yielding both overall insights and quantitative answers to questions from land-use planning to determining the range of a bird species or understanding rainfall patterns. The ESRI relationship with SDSC grew out the DICE group's work on the Mediation of Information using XML project, one aspect of which involved developing XML wrappers capable of combining or federating distributed, heterogeneous GIS data. Other DICE partnerships have ranged from GIS work with the US Census Bureau to pioneering persistent digital archives technologies for the National Archives and Records Administration. DICE researchers at SDCS will perform data-modeling to assist ESRI in developing the second version of ArcXML. The principal issue, beyond developing standards that work well in light of current advances, is to ensure interoperability with other standards such as the Open GIS Consortium Geography Markup Language, as well as related World Wide Web Consortium standards. Additional industry standards the researchers want to ensure ArcXML compatibility with include Sun's Enterprise JavaBean technologies and Microsoft's Simple Object Access Protocol.
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