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<center><H3>A middleware-based approach to format-insensitive raster data management in Open Source GISs</H3></center>

<P align="justify">Geographic Information Systems (GISs) allow to retrieve, store, manage, analyze, organize, edit and share, data and related metadata which are spatially referenced to the Earth.</P>
<P align="justify">In the last years the geospatial data community as well as the amount and type of available geospatial information have been increasingly growing. Contextually a few issues have emerged, here below we summarise some of them,
<UL>
<LI> A great variety of data formats exists and new formats are being added</LI>
<LI> Stored data may be very huge in size (Gigabytes,Terabytes) therefore its management may be expensive in terms of resources</LI>
<LI>Performant data management requires several optimized mechanismes (they will be discussed in the preliminar chapters of this thesis)</LI>
</UL>
<P align="justify">In such a dynamic field, finding a valid tool which is able to cope with all involved issues is a difficult task. Several tools to handle geospatial information exist, however, some are able to manage a single specific format, while some others are more powerful yet very expensive. This is a real limitation in the context of a vast Open Source GIS community.</P>
<P align="justify">The aim of this thesis is to provide a contribution to the Open Source GIS community with the development of an extensible framework which provides raster data management capabilities for a wide set of formats, where with the term "Raster Data" we refer to a type of data dealing with real world phenomena which vary continuously over space and time. The framework has been implemented in Java as an extension to SUN's Java Image I/O architecture by leveraging on the powerful Geographic Data Abstraction Layer library (a C/C++ Library). Data access and management capabilities offered by this framework, can be therefore employed through SUN's Java Advanced Imaging library in order to perform optimized raster data management.</P>
<P align="justify">It is also worth to point out that the GeoTools library, which is a powerful java middleware for the manipulation of geospatial vector raster data, will deeply leverage on the presented as supplementary data access layer. Moreover, GeoServer, an open source JEE platform for the management of geospatial information built upon GeoTools, will exploit this new data access capabilities in order to widen its range of supported formats.</P>