Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
4.1 WEB-BASED GEOCOMPUTATION
From its humble beginnings in the 1960s when the Internet was developed primarily to link select
university computers to the development of electronic mail (Cerf, 1993) and the WWW in the
1990s, the Internet has revolutionised many aspects of our daily lives. What started early on as the
enablement of the general public to access information, such as news, has now evolved to a full
spectrum of capabilities ranging from media sharing and online shopping to personal communica-
tions and various forms of social interaction. This revolution has been both driven and enabled by
the proliferation of personalised computers and portable computing devices such as smartphones
and tablets. This change is also seen within the field of Web-based GC, which we refer to here as the
Geographic World Wide Web or the
GeoWeb
for short (Haklay et al., 2008).
Whereas the generation and viewing of geographical information was initially limited to the
purview of specialists and dedicated workstations, it has now become of interest to the general
public. GeoWeb technology has revolutionised the way we access, utilise, consume and produce
spatial data, information and knowledge. The availability of the Global Positioning System (GPS),
the development of broadband (wired and wireless) communication networks, the emergence of
affordable location-aware mobile computing devices, the growing popularity of geo-browsers (e.g.
Google Maps/Earth and Microsoft Bing) and the ability to easily mash up geographic Web services
have brought personalised spatial information products to the fingertips of everyday users. Within
a few years, the GeoWeb has become an indispensable on-demand, affordable and easy-to-use
consumer product in a rapidly evolving information society. Geospatial information has become
part of numerous and diverse activities and applications, including real-time on-demand navigation,
LBS, environmental monitoring and resource management, health, defence and security.
As can be implied from its definition, the GeoWeb reflects the merging of geographical
information with Web-based content (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2011), empowering the users
with the capabilities to browse, view, customise and contribute geographical information
(Skarlatidou et al., 2013). If one considers the Web as a series of interlined HTML documents,
one can consider the GeoWeb as an 'interconnected, online digital network of discoverable
geospatial documents, databases and services' (Turner and Forrest, 2008). What lies behind the
GeoWeb is hardware (servers, computers and mobile devices), software objects (applications and
services) and programming techniques and technical standards that allow for the sharing and
communication of information.
In just a few years after its introduction, the WWW had transformed the way we view and dis-
tribute geographical information, moving away from paper maps to that of the digital as the main
form of distribution (Peterson, 1997). Within this chapter, we discuss how the GeoWeb has evolved
(Section 4.2) and link this evolution to the development of Web 2.0 technology (Section 4.3). We
then turn our attention towards crowdsourcing and its impact on Web-based GC, specifically that
of information generation (Section 4.4). Section 4.5 discusses how the GeoWeb allows for innova-
tive ways of visualising and simulating spatial phenomena with a specific focus on Digital Earth
and virtual world platforms. We then explore in Section 4.6 how GIS software is evolving towards
GIS services and the rise in LBS and lightweight software applications (so-called apps). Finally, in
Section 4.7, we conclude with a summary of this chapter and discuss how the GeoWeb might evolve
with the rise in massive amounts of locational data being generated through social media and the
growth of AR applications tied to specific locations.
4.2 EVOLUTION OF THE GEOWEB
Initially, the creation and viewing of geographical information was limited to specialists
and dedicated workstations (Batty, 1992). It was not until the 1990s that desktop geographical
information systems (GIS) made its entry with the release of ArcView and MapInfo. However,
people were quick to realise the potential of moving GIS beyond stand-alone desktop computers to
