Fateha Khanam Bappee et al. / International Journal of Engineering and Technology Vol.3 (1), 2011, 30-36 Abstract- The use of Geographic Information Systems is increasing rapidly now-a-days. The availability of remotely sensed data is effecting the applications of GIS greatly. Especially the creation and analysis of maps based on spatial data has been proved to be an outstanding field of research for the past decade. Map visualization is used to render maps. It provides an easy way to integrate functionally rich interactive maps into any desktop application and web application. The system presented in this paper allows the presentation of whole map of the world or any region based on spatial query. The system is capable of scaling a map and identifies a particular region. It allows the recognition of Global Positioning System (GPS) data and their conversion into system’s own data format. The converted data eventually is used in handheld devices such as PDA, Pocket map. The system provides persistent facilities and can address interoperability issues which are the main contributions of this paper. Keywords: Map visualization, GIS, GPS, Mapviewer, Shape file, Persistency, Interoperability. I INTRODUCTION The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) [2], [13] with spatial data is becoming more and more popular nowadays. The availability and usage of remotely sensed data augmented radically that necessitate advanced technologies in computer science and related areas. Location, shape, size, and orientation are included by spatial data. The attributes of spatial data are formally expressed by means of the geometric features of points, lines or polygons in a plane. Computer based geographical data services involve management spatial and non-spatial data. GIS has come to be an indispensable tool for analyzing and managing these spatial data. The development of a computer system by integrating GIS would serve the following two crucial purposes: (1) It should allow the user to operate the system without having to struggle with the underlying workings of GIS technology. (2) It should allow the sharing of information and technical expertise among all level of users. A growing amount of freely available GIS data on the Internet has motivated recent research into Geographic Information Retrieval (GIR) [14]. Generally GIR deals with the problem of retrieving meaningful GIS datasets. These GIS datasets largely contribute to the analysis of various GIS application tasks. One of the widely used applications is the map creation from the retrieved data. The performance of the GIS data analysis and map creation is largely influenced by some factors. Such as, to fully realize the capability and advantages of geographic information and the technology of GIS, sharing of spatial data needs to be made and the concerning systems need to be interoperable. This paper pays particular attention to handle the interoperability problem and provide persistence facilities which in turn improves the performance of correct map creation. The paper provides the framework for a shared spatial data infrastructure and a distributed architecture. Our proposed system uses shapefile (.shp) spatial data format. That is available in Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) [21]. This is used for creating shapefiles directly or converting data into shapefiles from other formats. The products of ESRI are developed based on open standards in order to ensure a high level of interoperability across databases, development languages, platforms, and applications. A shapefile whose purpose is to store the nontopological geometry, also store the attribute information for the spatial features in a data set. The geometry for the features is stored as a shape which comprise of a set of vector coordinates. For the purpose of map creation, our proposed system uses spatial data as input and by using this data the system can visualize map. A map is a geo-referenced data. This is not the data itself rather it is defined as a visual representation of geo-data. This data is very significant in An Integration of Interoperability and Persistency into GIS Data Analysis for Developing Map Engine Fateha Khanam Bappee 1 , Fahim Irfan Alam 2 , Rashed Mustafa 3 , and Mohammed Shahadat Hossain 4 1 Department of Computer Science & Telecommunication Engineering, Noakhali Science & Technology University, Bangladesh bappeenstu@gmail.com 2 Dept. of Math. Stat. and Computer Science St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. 1 falam@stfx.ca 3,4 Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh rashed_mustafa78@yahoo.com, hossain_ms@hotmail.com ISSN : 0975-4024 30