Linking ArcView™ and XGobi: Insight behind the Front End

Abstract

This article presents aspects of the implementation of a bidirectional link between the Geographic Information System (GIS) ArcView™ and the interactive dynamic statistical graphics program XGobi. We describe the main functionality of the link, the underlying remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism, and internal data structures, and discuss topics such as security, concurrency, and linked brushing. We think that these topics are of particular interest to software authors intending to link similar software packages, and software users learning about strengths (and weaknesses) of the implementation of our link.

Key Words:

• Cartographic data
• Dynamic statistical graphics
• Geographic information system
• Interprocess communication
• Multivariate spatial data
• Spatial cumulative distribution function
• Spatially lagged scatterplot
• Spatial statistics
• Variogram-cloud plot