Summary
Technical report
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Extract
Interoperable internet mapping--an open source approach.
Introduction
Internet GIS refers to GIS services that use the Internet as a primary means to access data, conduct spatial analysis, and provide services related to geographic information (Peng 1999; Peng and Tsou 2003). These services are typically GIS applications disseminated through the Internet for interactive use by web users. Thus we use the terms "services" and "applications" interchangeably in this manuscript. The past decade has witnessed passionate interests of researchers, practitioners, and vendors in exploiting various ways to promote the accessibility to geospatial data and services on the Web. This study concerns two important issues that are closely related to Internet mapping services. They are the issues of interoperability and Open source. Motivated by an emphasis on the democratization of cartography, which aims to empower individuals with electronic tools to map and analyze spatially referenced data (Morrison 1994; Kumar 2000), we are particularly interested in Internet GIS solutions that rely on open source resources, as they are most likely to be developmentally feasible, both financially and technically. The second motivation of the study is the universally acclaimed goal of interoperability. Generally speaking, interoperability is the ability of a system, or components of a system, to provide information portability and inter-application cooperative process control (Zhang et al. 2003). It boils down to the ability to share data and other resources among different systems. In the literature, the word "interoperability" may confer two types of meaning. The first refers to a data set or other system component being able to be used by different systems. The second refers to the ability of a system to utilize a range of data formats (Laurini 1998). Our study concerns the second type of interoperability. We present a standard-and-open-source-based framework for Internet mapping services that enable direct and interactive display of both vector and raster geographic data of a variety of formats. Many GIS vendors have developed proprietary Internet GIS software. Examples include Environmental Research Systems Institute (ESRI)'s ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server, Autodesk's MapGuide, Intergraph's Geomedia WebMap Professional, MapInfo's MapXtreme, ER Mapper's Image Web Server, and GE SmallWorld Internet Application Server. However, developing an application with proprietary Internet GIS software packages may be problematic in some situations for any number of reasons. First, it tends to be costly. The associated software cost inhibits many potential Internet GIS services, especially those intended to benefit users in the general public freely. ...See the full content of this document
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