A Holistic Approach for the Development and Implementation of Robust and Cost-Effective Enterprise WebGIS Business Solutions

Abstract

Recent advancements in internet mapping technology, efficient geospatial data management systems, and availability of different GIS API’s have revolutionized the way in which the geospatial data is being used, shared and represented through distributed systems for business applications. However, development of powerful, highly functional, yet cost- and time-effective enterprise WebGIS business systems requires a very robust and highly scalable architecture. The architecture should have the inherent characteristics of rapid development, a well-defined object library and at the same time it should comply with the existing geospatial interoperability standards defined by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). On the other hand, development of extendible distributed business GIS systems requires the presence of tailor-made inbuilt models available as modules which can be extended further by readily implementable user-interface templates supported by object modeling environment which allows for custom design and delivery of the processes and map output. There are various commercial and open source web mapping solutions which offer a great deal of flexibility and functionality. Nevertheless, they restrict the user community with certain limitations, in terms of functionality, cost or complexity. This necessitates, defining a new approach which efficiently caters the user requirements and not limiting them with aforementioned shortcomings. This paper aims to evaluate various architectural alternatives for delivering robust distributed GIS business solutions and also attempts to give an account of an implementable instance of a WebGIS architecture which can cater the multi-user and multi-industry requirements.