Design and development of a SpatiaLite geodatabase data provider for the DotSpatial GIS application development framework

Geospatial databases (geodatabases) provide an efficient method for managing large GIS datasets and allowing efficient sharing of data by multiple users. SpatiaLite is a portable file based open source geodatabase that is supported by a growing number of GIS systems. The latest platform with support for SpatiaLite is the DotSpatial system, an open source framework for creating custom GIS applications in C# or VB.NET programming languages. This presentation includes a discussion of SpatiaLite and its implementation in DotSpatial. The new SpatiaLite data provider supports creating, reading, editing and updating of vector features, executing spatial SQL queries, and efficient handling of large datasets using the R-tree spatial index. Additional built-in SpatiaLite functionality, including shapefile import and network routing is also supported. This presentation will show two custom GIS applications: A bicycle path network analysis tool and a hydrologic catchment water balance calculator. These applications demonstrate the advantages of using SpatiaLite for advanced spatial analysis tasks. By using SpatiaLite, all datasets for the custom GIS application are stored in one file, simplifying product deployment and distribution.