An Agent-Based System to Support Geo-Information Analysis

Geo-information systems (GIS) are software for the handling and analysis of spatial data and are at the heart of geo-information science (GISc). Most GIS functions require interaction with human experts. This is considered problematic since it causes extra complexity and increases the amount of resources required. Agent technology has the potential to assist in reducing this problem. However the current application of software agents to the GIS domain is very limited and fails to take into account the full functionality and advantages of agent technology. In this paper we discuss the application of agents in GIS and argue for the need to produce an agent- based framework for GIS. By way of context we define a novel agent-based system for one important aspect of GIS, the construction of a variogram. We quantitatively compare our architecture with two the existing agent-based tools: RePast for ArcGIS and Oracle agents.