A Web-Geographical Information System to Support Territorial Data Integration

Abstract

The design of a Web-geographical information system, Web-GIS (Worboys & Duckham, 2004; Zhong Ren & Ming Hsiang, 2003), strongly requires methodological and operational tools for dealing with information distributed in multiple, autonomous and heterogeneous data sources, and a uniform data publishing methodology and policy over Internet Web sites. In this article we describe the experience of the Politecnico di Milano group in the activities of requirement analysis and conceptual design of the DEAFIN Web-GIS (Schreiber et al., 2003), whose objective is to provide a common environment for comparison of information about available vacant industrial sites coming from different regional data sources. Heterogeneity and Web availability requirements have been taken into account in the system architecture design; the system is thus conceived as a federated Web-based information system, apt to manage and provide access to all the regional relevant information in an integrated and complete fashion. Furthermore, since the data available by a given region partner can be both spatial and alphanumeric, a Web-GIS is defined for each regional component system.