GIS is an important aspect of NSDI. It will directly and deeply affect the national economy construction and national safety. Comparing the progress of IT

the progress history and technical characteristics of GIS software are concluded in this paper. Also

the weakness of existing GIS software is pointed out and the technical reasons are analyzed. Furthermore

this paper presents the research objective and technology architecture of 4 th generation GIS software. The layer-oriented processing should be changed to spatial objects and their relationship-oriented. The synchronization multi user spatial data processing mechanism should be established. The 3-dimension spatial data model should be studied. Spatial data mining ability should be increased. Also

the 4 th generation GIS should manage and process mass spatial data up to TB level and should support VR presentation. The steps of developing 4 th generation GIS software in China are suggested in this paper.