XML Based Interoperable Geo-spatial Data Model

With the wide adoption of Geographic information systems in almost all functional areas and the widespread availability of World Wide Web, WebGIS is evolving rapidly. Enormous organizations have huge amount of geographic data. However, the data is available in different data formats. The majority of current commercial spatial applications use data formats proprietary to a specific platform. This heterogeneity has been a barrier for sharing data between various systems and for sharing procedures between users. As a result, GML, an Open Geospatial consortium (OGC) recommendation, has been developed as a common geo-data format to avoid platform dependency. GML (Geography Markup Language) is an extensible Markup Language (XML) dialect designed to transport and store geographic information. Since it is a standard public domain it can solve geo-spatial data interoperability problems significantly. Unlike other geo-spatial software GML is a flexible open source standard which can be used by users for free. And being a descendant of XML, GML separates geographic content (data) from geographic presentation (maps and diagrams).SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is another XML based language for describing two-dimensional static and animated vector graphics in XML. It is a W3C recommendation capable of producing quality vector graphics that can be transferred conveniently on the net. XSLT (extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) is an XML family with a purpose of transforming XML documents into almost anything.This thesis discusses on how geo-data of different formats are converted to and integrated in GML using FME suite and then styled in SVG for presentation. XSLT is employed to transform the GML data in SVG. Finally using CSS (cascading style sheet) and ECMA script an interactive, zoom able and searchable SVG map is embedded in a web browser for visualization.