ISPRS Workshop on Service and Application of Spatial Data Infrastructure, XXXVI(4/W6), Oct.14-16, Hangzhou, China 
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A SOLUTION STUDY OF GEOMATICS DATA 
INTEROPERABILITY BASED ON ORACLE SPATIAL 
Jianguo He a,b , Dazhi Guo a 
a China University Of Mining And Technology(Beij ing), No. 11, xueyuan road ,Beij ing, 100083 
b Hebei Geomatics Center, No.495, East Road Zhongshan, Shijianzhuang, Hebei Province, China,050031 
hejianguo@hebsm.gov.cn 
KEY WORDS: Interoperability, Oracle Spatial, Metadata, Geomatics, Middleware, GIS 
ABSTRACT: 
It is a trend to store geomatics data in Oracle Spatial for different kinds of GIS applications. Normally, the GIS applications depend 
on the special GIS software platform which have the ability to store geomatics data into Oracle Spatial. However, this kind of 
geomatics data by use of one GIS software platform can not been accessed by other GIS software platforms. It is called as a problem 
of data interoperability. In this paper, the main aim is to study a way for the data interoperability between different GIS software. For 
this purpose, the reasons derived this problem is analyzed, and the difference of data stored in Oracle Spatial by different GIS 
software platforms is compared. Also, the spatial data types appended to Oracle Spatial and middleware solution for data 
interoperability are discussed. The key of proposal solution is how to adjust the metadata in Oracle Spatial, which presents the 
different data stored by different GIS software platform, and to make a set of data stored in Oracle Spatial can been accessed using 
different kinds of client. 
1. THE IMPORTANCE OF SPATIAL DATA 
INTEROPERABILITY 
Interoperability refers to that the different users, application 
systems and computer systems can work together and share 
common data regardless the desktops and processing systems 
used; and the data interoperability refers to that the different 
systems can indirectly change data via common data conversion 
standard. While spatial data interoperability model is a standard 
defined by Open GIS Consortium (OGC), mainly makes GIS 
users able to access and retrieve the data from different 
structured database under the common understanding. 
At present, most GIS applications are tending to store graphic 
data and attribute data in common database, and choose Oracle 
as the database management system. Oracle Spatial has been 
recognized as a tool to store spatial data especially after Oracle 
Company releases the Spatial. Regard the Oracle Spatial, 
although it defines the storage field Geometry and it is open, it 
only defines the structure of the field without any define of the 
type code and coordinate sequence. Oracle Spatial can provide 
an open data structure, however, the different GIS system 
adopts different data format, together with different definition 
and expression in databases, it will result in some difficulties 
while access the data stored by other GIS system, and that data 
could not be shared, the potential usability of geo-spatial data is 
much limited. 
In short, two problems should be solved when read the spatial 
data stored in Oracle Spatial using different GIS system: One is 
necessary to make different GIS systems able to read the data 
from the same database; Another one, the different GIS system 
can share the common symbol. In this case, the clients can share 
not only the common spatial data but also the symbol data. 
The emphasis in this paper is to probe the interoperability based 
on Oracle Spatial for the different users. The geospatial data is 
stored in common object relation database, and the basic point 
of the proposal way is to make the different GIS platform able 
to access the data stored in Oracle Spatial directly, and the 
geospatial database becomes the fundamental and shared 
databases in order to provide information for different clients , 
the fundamental data of the digital city. 
2. FACTORS EFFECTING THE 
INTEROPERABILITY AND SOLUTIONS 
Many factors can result in the failure while access and operation 
of data stored in Oracle Spatial by different systems. Firstly, the 
different systems have different methods to recognize the 
spatial data table in the database, Secondly, the different GIS 
system describes the spatial data in different ways. Therefore, to 
realize different client system can share the data in the common 
database, the first thing to do is to find out the reasons of the 
problem.The follow will describe the main reasons that the 
spatial data were stored in different structures and modes 
2.1 Different GIS Platform Has Different Definition for 
Oracle Metadata. 
When using Oracle, different GIS platform adds its own data 
structure to Oracle, for example, Maplnfo uses its user model to 
manage the data structure, just the same, Map uses own user 
model to manage the data structure. The user model used in 
Oracle is commonly called GIS’s metadata in Oracle, it is used 
to manage the name of spatial data table in GIS database, the 
field name of spatial data, the field name of symbols, the 
spatial geometrical area and the geographical projection data etc. 
The metadata that Maplnfo generated in database is 
Maplnfomapcatalog, while the metadata that Map generated is 
Admpfeaturelayer, Admpimportsettings, Admpmetadata, 
Admpoptions and Admposemetadata. In addition, all GIS 
softwares add some own attributes in the layer table to store 
some controll info of the features, such as line colors, width, 
area filling methods etc. All these made the spatial data show 
many different structures and schemata in Oracle Spatial .