Mobile-Agent based distributed web GIS

Abstract

The widespread use of World Wide Web and the diversity of Geographic Information Systems (GISs) have led to an increasing amount of research on integrating a variety of heterogeneous and autonomous GISs into a cooperative environment to construct a new generation of GISs featuring in open architecture, distributed computing capability, interoperability and extensibility. This paper presents the ongoing research project MADGIS, i.e., Mobile Agent based Distributed Geographic Information System, which aims at integrating distributed Web GIS applications by using mobile agent technologies. The architecture of MADGIS, especially, the structure of client site, server site and mobile agent in MADGIS are described. Key techniques for MADGIS implementation, which include mobile agent building and distributed query processing, are explored. A prototype is established to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001.