Efficient Web-based access to multiple geographic databases through automatically generated wrappers

With the proliferation of various geographic database servers on the Internet, the need to access them simultaneously through the Web arises frequently for high-level decision making. The ongoing OpenGIS standard addresses many of the interoperability issues to make such global utilization of geographic databases possible. Based on the OpenGIS standard, the paper presents an object oriented architecture for the efficient Web based access to multiple geographic databases on the Internet. Called MEADOW, it provides a pair of automatically generated modules: the OpenGIS wrapper on the server side and the matching transparent access provider (TAP) on the client side. In cooperation with the wrapper, TAP supports an application´s efficient access to the databases through prefetching and caching of remote objects