Virtual Environments and Water Quality Management

IPODLAS—A software architecture for coupling temporal simulation systems, VR, and GIS

“…By combining concepts and paradigms of the three domains and exploiting their particular strengths, the investigating of spatiotemporal and cross-scale landscape processes forming the landscape can be improved. The benefits of combination and potential synergies of GIS and TSS (Bernhard and Krueger, 2000;Brimicombe, 2003;Fedra, 1993Fedra, , 1996Goodchild et al, 1996;Raper and Livingstone, 1995;Vckovski, 1998) as well as of GIS and VR (Camara et al, 1998;Huang et al, 2001;Lindstrom et al, 1997;Pajarola and Widmayer, 2001) are widely acknowledged. Combining the 'trio' GIS, VR, and TSS promises gains through cross-fertilization and mutual support, but it is conceptually and technologically complex.…”

“…TSS provides temporal capabilities and allows GIS to go beyond inventory and thematic mapping (Sui and Maggio, 1999). VR offers realistic representation and interactive exploration (Camara et al, 1998). By combining all three systems TSS, GIS, and VR IPODLAS moves a step further towards tool coupling following the hierarchical typology of integration of Brandmeyer and Karimi (2000), which is a networked modeling framework having integral subsystems wrapped within a common user interface.…”