What is Geolibrary

A new collaboration paradigm is in order between Digital Libraries (DL) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). These important Information Technology (IT) fields have witnessed great progress in the last few years, only to be surpassed by even greater expectations. Nonetheless, this extraordinary advance has come at a cost: the very proliferation of different representation formats, proprietary standards, protocols and platforms in which information is published or served is hindering the further development of these fields. One discouraging and generally ignored aspect of this situation is that both DL and GIS practitioners have been trying to deal with these problems in an isolated fashion, blind to each others’ achievements and approximations. The result is a lack of synergy and duplication of efforts. In this chapter, the authors share their experience in the GIS field to propose a collaborative approximation to solve some of the most recurrent problems both in DL and GIS.