WEB GIS: IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES

With the rapid expansion and development of Internet and WWW (World Wide Web or Web), Web GIS (Web Geographical Information System) is becoming ever more popular and as a result numerous sites have added GIS capability on their Web sites. In this paper, the reasons behind developing a Web GIS instead of a “traditional" GIS are first outlined. Then the current status of Web GIS is reviewed, and their implementation methodologies are explored as well. The underlying technologies for developing Web GIS, such as Web Server, Web browser, CGI (Common Gateway Interface), Java, ActiveX, are discussed, and some typical implementation tools from both commercial and public domain are given as well. Finally, the future development direction of Web GIS is predicted.