From nature conservation and environmental protection through urban development to the commodities industry – myriads of geodata are logged throughout all sectors. According to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, geoinformation is the foundation for future-oriented planning and political action. Digitalization has further imbued geoinformation with significance, making it an indispensable basis for public services and for coping with natural disasters. [1]

Integration of GIS in everyday work

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are used to transparently present complex interrelationships with technical and cross-border geoinformation.  But computer specialists were faced with a problem for some time: GIS are structured differently than the applications that specialist users in large companies and government bodies are used to. And moreover, why are two different programs needed to display the geo context when working on a technical task? Even though this is rather self-evident, there are hardly any development environments, frameworks, and other tools available to efficiently develop combined functional and geospatial applications.  

This is probably for historical reasons: In the beginning, GIS systems were mainly used by cartographers and other geodata specialists, and essentially only to develop thematic maps for different purposes. As they have developed completely separately from the other IT processes, they also function differently and are often difficult for occasional, inexperienced users to master. This is why GIS departments that are more or less independent of the other company IT have sprouted up in most companies and government bodies. Two separate areas of responsibility have thus developed: software development, in which the specialist users work on their processes, and the development of the associated maps. Before Google Maps and others entered the market and interactive maps were accessible to everyone, this was not a problem for the most part.

Digitalization brings change

But since the advent of Google Maps and countless geodata-hungry smartphone apps, the expectations of expert users have fundamentally changed. Whether taxi services, delivery services, or travel portal: maps in apps or on websites are the norm. So if you can simply tap on your smartphone to see where the bus or the nearest taxis are, how to get somewhere the fastest, and what hotels or restaurants are nearby, then you have to ask yourself: Why is high-end computer equipment in offices often not even able to display the information that was just processed on a normal road map, let alone offer the ability to select the objects on the map with the mouse for further processing?

Apparently, only a few software manufacturers have thus far had the simple idea of incorporating sophisticated geodata depictions (surfaces, lines, points) with all their subtleties, such as a legend and layers that can be switched on and off, directly into factual data-oriented applications. This feature is also rarely requested by customers – simply because they have never seen it like this before and perhaps cannot even imagine it.

A jointly developed plug-in standard

Unfortunately, implementing this idea is a whole other matter. Due to the lack of suitable frameworks, developers have no choice but to integrate the ready-made map controls of existing GIS systems into their Java Script or Java or .net code and then combine the functionality of both worlds as best they can. This poses a number of challenges, such as the need to synchronize the display of the objects that were just clicked on in both systems (the attribute data program and the GIS control) in order to avoid accidentally displaying inconsistent data. It becomes even more difficult when it comes to inserting or deleting objects dynamically, because then you have to create a transaction across two separate worlds.

Back in the days, a total of 20 docking points were identified, which can be operated bidirectionally when embedding foreign map controls. Since the development effort for this quickly reached a level that no single customer wanted to pay for, Scopeland decided to develop a joint 'Embedded GIS' plug-in standard together with a total of six GIS providers and manufacturers, which was integrated into their respective points by the companies involved.

[1] Federal Ministry of the Interior, for Building and Home: https://www.bmi.bund.de/DE/themen/moderne-verwaltung/geoinformationen/geoinformationen-node.html