Towards effective GML data management: framework and prototype

Geography Markup Language (GML) is composed of non-spatial information as properties of geographical features and spatial information as geometry. With the feature of XML-encoding and well-formed specification, GML has been widely used in various application systems as internal representation of geo-spatial data for its efficient interoperability in heterogeneous systems. This arises the demand to effectively manipulate GML data. The separate GML processing technology cannot provide a whole geo-spatial data management service for users. In this paper, we propose a GML data management framework and analyse how the relative technologies cooperate to meet the demand of geo-spatial data representing, processing and exchanging. Storage, index and query approaches, and corresponding integration technology are presented based on the proposed framework. The prototype of GML data management system (GDMS) was implemented based on the proposed framework.