Abstract

The Internet is now the main source of information. Most human activities take spatial information into account, and spatial data over the web are prominent in our daily life. We look at spatial data when we want to know about weather conditions and forecasts, for travel directions when we are heading off on vacation, or for a better grasp of online news that can be mapped, for example, a map of average family income per county. Because geographic data are big, and users dislike waiting to see a weather map or a travel route, specific data structures for efficiently transferring spatial data have been developed. These data structures are implemented as web data formats in which the geographic data can be “stored, sorted and packed.” Examples of such formats include GML, KML, GeoJSON, GeoRSS, and so on, and web data service standards such as WMS, WCS and WFS.