Modeling Cadastral Spatial Features Based on Geography Markup Language in GIS: A Case Study in Shanghai

Abstract

Significant progresses have been made in the establishment of cadastre databases in developing countries and the use of cadastre as a base to the development of land information systems based on Geographic Information System (GIS). How to interoperate and share these homogenous data is still a big problem in the applications of cadastral databases. This paper presents a GML (Geography Markup Language) approach to model cadastral spatial features for data interoperability and sharing. The advantages of GML in data interoperability are that (1) it provides an open and standard way to share and interoperate spatial data, and (2) it enables on-line and variety of spatial data interoperability on the Web. The cadastral spatial feature models are first defined based on geography markup language. An application schema is then defined, in which the cadastral features are described as CityModel, StreetModel, BlockModel, LandModel and BuildingModel, and the relationships between them are defined as CityMember, StreetMember, BlockMember and Landmember. The creation of a GML document is discussed in details. Furthermore, a GML-based cadastral WebGIS system is developed based on Java, Document Object Model (DOM) and Simple Application Interface for XML (SAX), and the implementation of the system is illustrated through a case study, which shows the feasibility of the proposed spatial feature models and data interoperability based on GML.

Keywords: Cadastral spatial feature, geographic information system, geography markup language, interoperability, modeling