Web Services Composition and Geographic Information - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 104

CHAPTER 5
Web Services Composition and
Geographic Information
Pasquale Di Giovanni, a,b, * Michela Bertolotto, a Giuliana
Vitiello b and Monica Sebillo b
Introduction
In recent years, the continuous development of the Web and network
infrastructures has had a profound impact both on the way users' access
information and utilize traditional computer applications, and on the
manner these applications are designed and developed. The network
development, in fact, has been a key factor for the transition from stand alone
and centralized software architectures to distributed ones, enabling software
components located in different geographic locations to communicate
through the network in order to provide for coordinated services and joint
results.
One of the main limitations of the first distributed systems was
represented by the great difficulty or by the complete inability to
communicate with other applications running on different technological
platforms. The technical complexity met during the development of such
distributed solutions has fostered the emergence of different middleware
technologies, such as Microsoft Distributed Component Object Model
a School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfi eld, Dublin 4,
Ireland.
Emails: [e-mail]; [e-mail]
b Department of Management and Information Technology (DISTRA), University of Salerno,
Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132-84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy.