Working with maps on the Internet has become a new standard for organizations to disperse important information, allow individuals to query and extract data, and enable non-GIS users to solve spatial problems in a user-friendly interface that requires nothing more than a web browser.

There are countless applications for Internet mapping. Internet mapping can help real estate agents and developers, e-businesses, local municipalities and non-profit organizations with location-based web solutions. At the local, county and state level, municipalities have employed Internet mapping to disperse critical information such as local weather conditions, road/highway traffic congestion and construction zones, flood data (for flood-sensitive areas), and parcel-level data. Non-profit organizations have often utilized Internet mapping in order to help users learn more about their cause and their location(s) of concern. Real estate professionals have begun to use Internet mapping technology in order to help potential buyers geographically find property of their choice. As you can see, individual users can tap into the full functionality of the maps without knowing anything about GIS software. Additionally, anything that can be mapped can be put into a GIS, and anything that can go into a GIS can be placed over the Internet for the general population.

Beyond Internet mapping for casual users, for those who work in the field, Internet mapping solutions can provide access for individuals to map data via hand held devices, from which map data is obtained through their company's Intranet. By employing this method, cumbersome GIS files no longer need to be "stored" in each hand held device. Rather, data is simply warehoused in one location - namely a secure server - that can be accessed remotely at any time.

Red Paw Technologies can work with your Internet mapping solution in a variety of ways. You may opt to have all of your spatial data, database(s), spatial servers and software running in-house at your location, or Red Paw Technologies can maintain all of your data on our secure servers for the life of your project. Additionally, ArcIMS mapping solutions can be fully integrated with existing ESRI ArcGIS desktop software. We can help design and deploy your system in order to optimize your GIS capabilities.

Red Paw Technologies also provides two main approaches that would enable users to interactively work with the GIS maps online: (1) Through ESRI's ArcIMS software, and (2) via ESRI's web services, known as the ArcWeb toolkit. The first approach utilizes the ESRI ArcIMS software directly, in which geographic data is stored on a secure server (which can either reside at our location or at your office) and web pages are "served up" through that dedicated server.

The second approach involves far less software and hardware, utilizing ESRI's web services. Web services can be likened to Google's search engine. When using Google, you type in a topic you wish to find. You don't need to know exactly the how Google does it, as long it finds what you are looking for from a few key words that you typed in. Somewhere behind the scenes on a distant server, Google finds your item. This is essentially a web service: you made a request, and somewhere in cyberspace (namely one of Google's many web servers in Silicon Valley, California), Google performed a function. Similarly, ESRI's ArcWeb technology enables Internet users to utilize GIS tools and make requests via the web without the user ever knowing how these services are performed.

Yet a third approach (albeit used far less often) is the use of Macromedia Flash™ and SVG files, which do not utilize any ESRI software at all. Maps are created specifically to the client's specifications in which users would have fully interactive functionality utilizing a Flash-style type of interactive map.

The latest version of ESRI's ArcIMS, ArcIMS 9, enables users to interactively perform GIS functions and queries without the user having any of the actual GIS software (such as ArcView or ArcINFO) or any geographic data. ArcIMS allows your organization to distribute high-end geographic information systems and mapping services to hundreds of thousands of people via the Internet. Your audience (known as "clients" in IT terms) may be city or county residents wishing to find locations of municipal services, city-bound commuters wanting the latest traffic reports and weather updates, or potential home buyers attempting to locate a home within walking distance to an elementary school in a specific school district.

The ArcIMS software resides on one or many servers, stores geographic data and "serves up" web pages on demand. The user can interact with either a custom-made or an "out-of-the-box" graphic interface equipped with tool buttons, menus and more. Users can make geographic selections from various data sets, pan and zoom in and out of maps, or run advanced queries to help users find what they are looking for.

GIS Web services are relatively new. As described very briefly in the paragraphs above, search engines, such as Google, are web services. Additionally, when you want to locate an address or obtain driving directions using Yahoo! Maps™, you're employing a web service. There is no software to be installed on either the "server" end or the "client" end. All of the functionality of these interactive maps takes place through what is known as a web portal.

Geographic data is used by those in many different organizations and professions, ranging from real estate, emergency services, e-commerce and government identities, to Homeland Security, geology, engineering, urban planning, and many more. However, many dissimilar organizations often use overlapping data sets. They are likely to use the same boundaries, as well as topographic, demographic and administrative data. Although these data sets are used for different purposes, the functionality generally remains constant: the display of maps, locating addresses, buffering of features, finding distances and the like. Web services have attempted to integrate GIS data and high-level functionality for a broad spectrum of practices and professions. GIS Web services allow users to access this data and functionality through their web browsers, without the need to develop any kind of mapping application, storing any data, or building tools for querying data. Hence, multiple organizations can access the same data and use the same tools, eliminating data redundancy and costly application development.

Let's use real estate as an example. Home-buyers have a healthy appetite for information when they are ready to buy a home, and rightfully so. It is one of the biggest investments a family or an individual can ever make. Home buyers are hungry for a wide range of information, all with spatial relevance: school districts, neighborhood amenities, proximity to major highways for commuting, local traffic conditions, zoning laws, regional demographics, tax zone boundaries, flood zones, earthquake and/or landslide susceptibility, and much more. Web services can allow potential home buyers to query properties and neighborhoods, while real estate professionals can showcase available properties geographically - all without any hardware or software on either end.

GIS Web services have been made possible by the coupling of two widely accepted Internet standards, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is actually written in XML. Like HTML, XML is a markup language that uses command lines or "tags" to describe data. Introduced in the early 1990s, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the de facto standard for web page design. Unlike any other markup language, HTML is superior for formatting Web pages and controlling the display of the page on a web site. Although HTML can format text and images nicely, it is too rigid to provide more intelligible interaction between a user and the web site. Hence, HTML severely limits user interaction with more advanced applications over the Internet. As a result, XML was born and has become the critical link between the web interface and the web server.

XML, which was developed strictly to complement HTML, not to replace it, differs from HTML in that it is more suitable for describing data rather than merely formatting it. Additionally, as the name implies, XML is extensible: it allows users to define their own data definitions (called schema) in order that any data type can be transmitted via the web.

While XML works to describe data, SOAP is a protocol used to determine how such data is transferred from one device to another. SOAP is the most widely used protocol for this process, is completely application-independent, and can be integrated with any web application. By utilizing both the XML and SOAP standards in GIS Web Services, users can now view, query and extract geographic information via the Internet as if they were running all of the GIS software on their own personal computers. All of the GIS data and functionality is maintained on the "server side" of the application. The user never needs to understand how these tools work or where map data are stored. In the near future, this brand of GIS functionality will be more commonplace on all types of wireless devices such as PDAs, cellular phones and Bluetooth devices.

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