Nowadays, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are powerful and useful tools as means of information, visualization and research or as decision making applications.1 Recently, intelligent spatial analysis is the main need presented in the Geocomputation trends. Spatial data have an important role in this situation; many times, the information is extended at different places. The problem is greater, because the spatial data present different formats and specifications such as scale, projection, spatial reference, representation type, thematic, DBMS type, and date. For these reasons, the heterogeneity of the spatial data complicates the spatial analysis.
We propose a distributed schema based on XML to develop a standard spatial specification, which is used to recover spatial data. This schema allows exchanging, transferring, and storing geographical information into a geographical depository.
Proposals and projects have been designed to retrieve the spatial data. In the majority of the cases, the recovered data represent the information in a raster format (jpeg, gif).2 This information is difficult to use to make spatial analysis, because its intrinsic characteristics are not explored. Important projects have been designed to represent geographical information in the web (Web-Mapping), but these applications are closed to handle spatial data.3
In this paper, we propose a mechanism to make spatial analysis by means of SAM. SAM can recover geographical objects using a distributed environment. SAM is a tool designed to simulate natural phenomena with special methods focused on detecting landslides and flooding areas. XML is used to develop an encoding specification based on qualitative and quantitative properties of the spatial data. The main goal of this application is to find the solutions for making spatial analysis and recovering spatial data in a distributed environment. This is a great challenge in the new trends of Geocomputation field.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In Section 2 we present the architecture of the GIS-application and describe the functionality of the system modules. Some obtained results are shown in Section 3. Section 4 exposes our conclusion related to the work.
1. M. F. Goodchild (2000) Perspective: Browsingmetadata, where do wegofromhere? GeoInfo Systems10(5): 30–31.
2. M. Torres, Herramienta SIG de Escritorio para la Recuperación, Manejo y Análisis de datos espaciales (CIC-IPN, México, D.F., 2001), (M.S. Thesis in Spanish).
3. M. Worboys, Innovations in GIS SelectedpaperfromtheFirstNationalConferenceon GIS Research (Editorial GME, United Kingdom, 1994).
