GeKon - Applying Novel Approaches to GIS Development

This paper describes a few ideas concerned with geographical information systems (GIS) development. Those ideas come from a GIS development project named GeKon, which is now held on the Department of Computer Science at CTU. The first of them deals with a huge semantic gap between the complex structure of real world and its representation in GIS. Some papers describe this problem as a consequence of wide usage of procedural programing languages and relational database management systems in contemporary GIS development. The object-oriented approach is usually recommended as a better way of constructing such systems. We demonstrate here our findings in object modelling, programing and data management achieved in GeKon project. The other idea shows the fact, that not always the term object-oriented is understood in the same way. People usually have in mind some specific programing language and its structures, instead of the real problem and its solution. In this paper we want to clarify those misleadings and try to describe requirements, that should be fulfilled to achieve expected benefits of this approach. We also introduce next supposed steps in the GeKon project.