Establishing a Generic Geographic Information Collection Platform for Heterogeneous Data

Geographic information collection platforms are widely used for acquiring geographic information. However, existing geographic information collection platforms have limited adaptability and configurability, negatively affecting their usability. They do not support complete field collection workflows or capture data with complex nested structures. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a generic geographic information collection platform based on a comprehensive XML schema definition and a corresponding XML toolkit. This platform includes professional and non-professional versions of collection software, as well as a management system. Users can configure controls and define nested tables within this platform to collect heterogeneous and complex nested data. Moreover, the platform supports functions such as task assignment, local deployment servers, multitasking parallelism, and summary statistics of heterogeneous data, ensuring complete workflow support for field data collection. The platform has been applied in agriculture, forestry, and related fields. This paper uses the agricultural industry structure survey as a case study. Practical applications and our case study show that this platform can reduce software development costs, lower user knowledge prerequisites, and fulfill 95% of geographic information collection scenarios.