The need for open geographical information systems in medicine

This paper presents a promising approach of using component-oriented geographical information systems (GIS) to facilitate improved medical and ecological applications. The integration of administrative geographical and medical data (map overlay) allows sophisticated and advanced analysis. This can serve as a basis to detect undiscovered relationships. We hope to increase the usage of geographical information by the creation of a general framework. This approach is mainly supported by two advances in recent years. Geographical data (e.g. administrative areas) is up-to-date, consistent and covers Germany completely. In addition, enormous technological improvements in the area of high-bandwidth networks and component-based software development have been made. These advances allowed to define our general framework for the integration of GIS functions into existing and already accepted applications.