Laser Scan Secondment to JRC Ispra:

Reasons for your application for a scientific visit...

To further European knowledge of, and influence on, object-oriented GIS and emerging standards for interoperability, and to introduce them through a range of development and educational initiatives to the JRC and wider European community.

Proposed subject of work during the visit...

Coordination of European geographic Information Systems (GIS) standardisation activities in relation to interoperability and OpenGIS^® emerging standards.

Standardization activities including writing software to exercise and test proposed interoperation, data transfer and metadata standards as well as attending standardisation meetings and participating in discussion groups by email and usenet bulletin boards.

Technical and commercial presentations to European industry groups on the technical merits and commercial adavantages of object-oriented inter-operation standards and of object-oriented GIS in general.

Preparation of demonstrator software and presentation materials for distribution and discussion in the European GIS community.

Research and dissemination in technology transfer, training, adoption strategies and backwards compatibility issues for non-object-oriented European GIS systems users and developers seeking to take advantage of object-oriented standards and techniques without requiring a commercially infeasible additional effort.

Investigation into the training needs in European GIS developers for object-oriented programming skills (e.g. Java, Python, Eiffel) and the development of new training materials specifically aimed at professional programmers working with spatial databases.

Investigation into the software development processes in European GIS systems developers in conjunction with researchers at the European Software Engineering Institute in Bilbao. A comparison between this and corresponding efforts at the American Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh.

Development of a GIS-customisation of the Unified Modelling Lanaguage (UML) object-oriented design notation to cover common GIS design object types. Use of this to document common GIS class framework idioms ("patterns").

Investigation of the practicalities and scalability of a proposed new technique "Object Terrain Modelling": an extension of Digital Terrain Modelling where each spatial location is associated with an object consisting of many attribute values rather than fixed-length set of digits representing one attribute value or colour.

Philip Sargent
24 October 1997

This statement was approved and accepted as the subject of work to be followed by Dr. Sargent as a Visiting Scientist at the JRC.

Note: OpenGIS^® is a registered trade mark of the Open GIS Consortium.