Abstract:The management system of the 3D lithospheric structure database of China is the management and service center of the 3D lithospheric structure database of China. The total system design was completed and all kinds of technical specifications were worked out based on an analysis of the requirements of the 3D lithospheric structure database of China. A metadata editor and browser that can be used for different metadata formats, such as FGDC, ESRI and XML, were developed by using the Component Object Model (COM) technique. The Geodatabase data model of ESRI, an object oriented data model, was adopted to design the 3D lithospheric structure database of China by using the Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tool. The object oriented Universal Modeling Language (UML) was used to design and optimize the database structure. Based on MapObjects (MO) and ArcObjects (AO) under Arcinfo 8.x, two different types of COM management systems, which are simple to operate, have a complete range of functions and are suitable to professional GIS experts and other users respectively to do any query and process, were established.