Internet Mapping Education: Curriculum Technology and Creativity - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 122

• Service Use
• Standard Clients for Service Use
• Custom Clients for Service Use
• Multiple Spatial Data Services
• End User Clients
The approach here was to selecting a combination of Web Mapping technology
and development environments. Students would use these technologies and develop
projects to showcase their understanding to these disciplinary skills. A second
consideration was to have student use technologies that are common with in the
USA geospatial professional workplace. The basic design of Web Mapping services
is showing in Fig. 10.1 . The basic element of a GI service starts with a network most
commonly the Internet. A server on the network host a GI service and clients or
other service consume the data for the GI Services. Within the server any number of
designs can be deployed but the simple structure is that GI server is hosted directly
or through a Web servers. The GI server will with store within of get form external
devices the spatial data and/or spatial processing functionalities.
In the course issues like servers, network, web servers, database service, and
middleware were explained but the students did not work with them. The main
focus for the students was on the build of the GI services and clients.
The GI server software used in the course was ArcGIS server 10.1 deployed on
Microsoft Internet Information Web server with the DotNET framework. Student
where asked to design both services and Web application using the ArcGIS Server
application. For the more detailed client development for specific Internet Mapping
applications students used the combination of Adobe FLEX 4 and Adobe Flash
builder 4. This development environment was selected for several reasons:
Fig. 10.1 Conceptual structure of web mapping environment