Features of SuperMap GIS

SuperMap GIS is an integrated collection of GIS software products widely used in various application environments ranging from mobile device to personal computer, from workstation to server, from stand-alone to network, from LAN to WAN and so on. SuperMap GIS leverages many up-to-the-minute techniques, and is a full range GIS software platform keeping close pace with IT development. SuperMap GIS has many essential features.

Unified Data Model

All SuperMap GIS products employ the same data model, which can be used directly in all SuperMap GIS products without any data conversion (except that the mobile GIS platform needs some simple conversion of data in order to fit data for the mobile environment better). Thus, no extra workload is needed and no loss of information occurs when sharing data among different SuperMap GIS products.

Figure 1.3.1.1 All SuperMap GIS products share the unified data model

Service Oriented Architecture

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is now a mainstream software engineer approach. This approach is well practiced in SuperMap GIS 6R products.

Services are the essential part of SOA. SuperMap service GIS products have exposed a complete range of GIS services via a collection of standard service interfaces. These services include map service, data service, spatial analysis service, network analysis service, bus transfer solutions service, etc. SuperMap supports publishing services of multiple types, including Web services and native services (e.g. RMI, WCF TCP). Here, we refer to Web service as a much general concept, covering a variety of services that can be accessed via standard Web protocols, such as REST, SOAP, OGC W*S (WMS, WFS, WCS, WPS), KML, GeoRSS, and many other services. Users can access GIS services enabled by SuperMap by invoking interfaces for these services (GIS service interfaces), e.g. REST service interfaces, SOAP interfaces, etc.

The clients to consume these published services are not confined to only web browsers; they can also be SuperMap desktop or component GIS products.

Multi-Source Spatial Data Support

　　◆ Conversion of multiple data formats

SuperMap GIS has powerful data interchange ability. It can exchange data with some other GIS and CAD software through an import/export data pump. Not only E00, MIF, DXF and other common text interchange formats, but also TAB (MapInfo), SHP (ArcView), DWG (AutoCAD), DGN (MicroStation) and other binary data formats are all supported by SuperMap GIS. In addition, it also supports lots of image data formats such as TIFF, GEO-TIFF, BMP, JPEG, IMG (Erdas), MrSID, and ECW.

Figure 1.3.3.1 Main vector and raster data formats supported in SuperMap GIS

　　◆ Seamless integration with multi-source spatial data

The problem of multi-format data source integration has been one of the most challenging problems in GIS development, since various data formats in different geographic information systems have made it difficult to share information. SuperMap GIS has an essential Seamless Integration with Multi-source Spatial Data (SIMS) technique which allows direct access to multiple data formats without any conversion. Data authored in other software than SuperMap, including vector formats such as DWG, DXF, and DGN, and raster formats such as BMP, JPEG, TIF, and RAW, can be directly accessed in SuperMap GIS products. This technique features direct access to multi-format data, data format independent integration, data location independent integration and multi-source data integrated management.

SIMS adopts an open automatic engine loading technique, allowing data engine customization. Thus, SuperMap GIS products can directly access any user-defined data formats without requiring the data providers or authors to expose their data structure.

Figure 1.3.3.2 Seamless Integration with Multi-source Spatial Data

　　◆  XML Support

SuperMap GIS completely supports GML 3.0 standards, and each dataset or geometric object can be output into XML strings. Meanwhile geometric objects can be created from XML strings. In this way, the data generated in SuperMap can be interchanged with other software that supports XML, and geospatial data can be transmitted over the Internet in the form of XML strings.

Furthermore, XML is supported in the storage of workspace. The format of SuperMap GIS workspace can be either stored in binary format (.smw) or XML format (.sxw) so that easy workspace maintenance and fast transmissions over the Internet are possible.

Massive Spatial Data Management Technique

SuperMap GIS is designed to support enterprise applications from the right beginning. It innovatively supports massive spatial data management with several essential techniques, including multi-level hybrid spatial indexing technique and massive image data management technique etc.

　　◆ Multilevel Hybrid Spatial Indexing Techniques

Massive spatial data management is a critical technical problem for modern GIS software. It is one of the main factors to determine whether the GIS software can be used for a large-scale project or not. Spatial data indexing is a key technique for implementing massive data management. SuperMap GIS innovatively developed the multiple hybrid indexing technique based on quad tree, R tree and grid indexing technologies, which overcomes the disadvantage of traditional single indexing technique and lays a solid foundation for massive spatial data management.

　　◆ Spatial Database eXtension (SDX+) Technology

SuperMap’s SDX+ technology adopts a new innovative data structure and indexing technology, and has a high performance in managing large volume data. Its proven capabilities have far gone beyond its counterpart technologies. SuperMap SDX+ has been already applied in a variety of large-scale GIS application projects.

SDX+ allows accessing data from most of the mainstream commercial RDBMS, including Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, DB2, Informix, Kingbase, DM, etc.

　　◆ Massive Image Data Management Technique

Image data is a most important data source of GIS applications. With development of high resolution remote sensing technology and its increasingly wide applications, the size of a high resolution image of a certain region is growing very fast from hundreds of MB to hundreds of GB and even as much as several TB. Therefore, an efficient storage strategy and fast presentation of massive image data becomes a major obstacle in GIS applications. SuperMap responds to this challenge and successfully developed a series of massive image data management techniques such as massive image data storage technique, MrSID and ECW compressed image formats support as well as cross-platform massive image data compression technique - SuperMap Image Tower (SIT).