GIS Providers in SAP Geographical Enablement Framework

The main focus of the framework is to bring together geographical data and their associated business data and present them as a feature service.

As there are many geographical information systems in the market, each of which might have its own protocol, the SAP Geographical Enablement Framework’s abstraction of feature service is defined by business layer and geometry layer. These layers are part of the framework object hierarchy that allow business applications to model their business. A feature service allows clients to query and edit features. Features include geometry, attributes, and symbols.

The framework has implemented and delivered Esri as its default GIS provider. One goal of the framework is to allow business applications to expose a feature service in the format of other GIS providers, provided that the GIS providers could be aligned with the framework’s version of the feature service concept. A GIS provider needs to implement the interface IF_GEF_INBOUND_MAP_SERVICE and IF_GEF_OUTBOUND_MAP_SERVICE, and maintain Customizing for the GIS provider.

GIS implementation is considered as part of the framework, while business object specific implementation is considered as application side development.