摘要
The underlying vision of the Digital Earth(DE)calls for applications that can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced data and allow users to study and analyse of our planet.Since the declaration of this vision in the late 90s,a significant number of DE data-sets have been created by the industry,governments,non-governmental organisations and individuals.An overwhelming majority of the successful applications that use DE data-sets has its end-user applications running on the desktop.While these applications are great tools,they remain inaccessible to the community as a whole.In this paper,we present a framework for the development of cyber-applications.We define an abstract architecture for cyber-applications based on the model-view-controller paradigm,which allows the dynamic inclusion of functional and data components into its execution engine at run-time.We define the operational characteristics of cyber-applica-tions.We also specify the interface of pluggable components to the architecture.Finally,we demonstrate the appropriateness of the abstract architecture by means of a case study.
