Spatial information modelling and analysis in a distributed environment

The availability of data is increasing rapidly, but the many data sets that are becoming available are stored on a variety of platforms and in differing formats. Moreover, although new data analysis methods are also appearing, the individual implementations of these methods may only be available on specific platforms and must be accessed according to differing protocols. To take advantage of this new data accessibility, it is necessary to examine data sets collectively and extract useful information from them. This paper describes work on the development of an open software framework for exploratory analysis that incorporates various distributed tools for the analysis of spatial information. The architecture of this system is described first, and this is followed by an example describing how the combination of various tools involving the application of several different connectionist-based rule extraction techniques can be used to carry out an exploratory investigation