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In the last decades, the utilization of Geographic Information (GI) on the web has quickly grown as a result of advent of digital mapping and powerful computing. In order to meet web user needs, many research issues have been addressed and which are focused on developing techniques related to acquisition, storage, structuring and handling of GI on one side and technologies of information and communication on the other side. Generalisation services or geographic web services (Foerster et al., 2010; Burghardt et al., 2010; Pornon et al., 2008), geographic search engine (Flora, 2011) and Webmapping (Cecconi, 2003; Bernier et al.,2005; Jabeur, 2006; Weibel et al., 2008; Burghardt et al., 2010; Guffuri, 2012) are examples of developed web-applications.
Webmapping is defined as “a set of dynamic and interactive mapping applications available on the Web allowing primarily a user to view maps containing more or less of geographic information” (Pornon et al., 2009). Mostly based on Multiple Representation (MR) and generalisation approaches, these applications are often structured around a main task, which is the search and generation of requested map.
Indeed, the large amount of handled GI available on the web comes primarily, from different Geographic Databases (GDB) designed independently of each other with a very high cost, in order to meet specific needs, although they relate to the same location. To model and manage a such information, a first class of approaches proposes the integration of these GDBs into a single one called for this purpose Multiple Representation Database (MRDB).This information is organized according to two multiplicity factors (see Figure 1); Level of Detail (LoD) and Point of View (PoV) (Vangenot, 2004) which respectively correspond to the concept of map scale (the level of granularity of GI) and the way of perceiving a real entity located on the surface of the earth (map objective) (Parent et al., 2002; Sarjakoski, 2007; Derbal et al., 2009). However, the satisfaction of the great diversity of web users requires the personalization of requested map. This is where an alternative ambitious approach appears called the generalisation; it allows generating as much representations as expressed needs from a very detailed GDB (high LoD). But, because of its complexity, the automation of generalisation process doesn’t achieve, it keeps improving since its inception thirty years ago, even more in the context of the web (Ruas et al., 2007; Park et al., 2011; Smirnoff et al., 2012; Brassel et al., 1988; Mc master, 1992).
Figure 1. Overall tasks of proposed approach
Our work fits into this research area; we propose a Webmapping approach that addresses the process from beginning to end according to our own methodology.