Presented at
Hawai'i International Conference on
System Sciences (HICSS-32), Maui, January 1999.
See also the accompanying
technical paper.
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.
Powerpoint version of the slides