Legacy application systems have been widely used by user communities, and by individual users. They are currently providing a variety of functions required by system development requirements. For the development of a new 3D system using such legacy systems, we need both (i) the migration of legacy systems into a new 3D system environment, and (ii) interoperations among these systems. This paper proposes a framework for the ad hoc integration of a 2D legacy GIS, legacy simulators, and legacy databases, which are not a priori assumed to be integrated with each other. For this purpose, we first propose a mechanism to migrate a 2D legacy system with its GUI into a 3D environment. This mechanism is based on a special coordinate transformation for both the texture mapping and the event dispatching. It enables us to use a 3D terrain model with a shadow copy of a 2D legacy GIS. As for legacy geographic simulators and legacy databases without any GUI, we provide them with their proxy objects. These proxy objects can interoperate with each other, and also with the shadow copy of a 2D legacy GIS through their slot connections. As a result, our approach enables us to dynamically integrate multiple independent legacy simulators and/or legacy databases with a 2D legacy GIS simply through the composition of their 3D display objects.
SUMMARYIn order to access target information while getting an overview of the entirety of a large-scale database, a search must be carried out in parallel with various modifications to the frame of reference and dynamic organization of the information. In this research, this type of database search is realized through an information access space dynamically constructed of hyperlinks based on an arbitrary frame of reference. The authors propose a new concept and structure for the frames of reference and develop a mechanism for dynamically linking individual database records with multiple information access spaces, dynamically constructed on the basis of declarative definitions of these frames of reference. The authors also provide a three-dimensional interface for editing frames of reference and for spatial navigation threaded by these links. These operations correspond to query processing by narrowing down the subject tables and joining multiple tables; the user can gradually narrow his focus and arrive at the target information by dynamically modifying his frame of reference and repeating spatial movements. In this paper, a three-dimensional interface is developed and database searches using that interface are evaluated; it is shown that this technique makes it possible to quickly access target information.
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