Archived: 16 March 1998
Published in Proc. of Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-32), Maui, January 1999.
Many decision support applications that manipulate spatial data involve operations on very large data sets internally, which may require the use of high-performance compute servers, but carry out data reduction operations to provide summarised information to the end user. We have investigated the consequences of connecting high-performance resources together with broadband networks, but providing user access at the modest network capabilities of a modem link via the World Wide Web.
A range of technologies exist to manipulate spatial data and to integrate modules together. We focus on Web, Java and CORBA technologies and discuss the issues we have encountered in implementing prototype distributed geographic information systems incorporating ``active'' digital libraries, which provide remote data processing as well as remote data access. We have experimented with large online image repositories such as for earth observation satellites, as well as other sources of geospatial data.
Client/server computing, particularly over wide-area networks, is not yet widely used for GIS applications and research, but we believe it has great promise in systems such as we describe.
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