Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 4.1
PARC Map Viewer. (From Putz, S.,
Comput. Netw. ISDN Syst.
, 27(2), 273, 1994.)
the WWW. This transition allowed GIS to move beyond being a tool for the expert to also become
a tool for a much wider audience to share and communicate information about the Earth or geolo-
cated information at large (Sui and Goodchild, 2011).
The dissemination of geographical information and Web mapping, in particular, started early
after the Internet with the Xerox PARC Map Viewer (Putz, 1994) which is shown in Figure 4.1. As
one can see, the viewer had limited capabilities such as fixed zooming. The early realisation that
significant infrastructure was needed to deliver an acceptable user experience in near real time
(Herring, 1994) served as a key motivation for the development of the GeoWeb. Compared to cur-
rent GeoWeb capabilities, these old static map visualisations have been upgraded dramatically with
multiple layering, interactivity and multimedia, thus enhancing the user experience (as discussed in
Gibin et al., 2008 and further elaborated in Section 4.3 of this chapter). While the technical develop-
ment of mapping over the Internet has been discussed extensively elsewhere (e.g. Doyle et al., 1998;
Peng and Tsou, 2003; Plewe, 2007; Haklay et al., 2008), in the following, we focus on the key phases
in the evolution of the GeoWeb.
Plewe (2007) identified four technical generations of the GeoWeb. The
irst
was based on HTML
and Common Gateway Interfaces which provided static maps, with limited user interaction
(e.g. simple zoom and panning functions) based on simple HTTP requests. These first-generation
