Enabling GIS services in a P2P environment
Jihong Guan, Leichun Wang, Shuigeng Zhou · 2004
Geographic information system (GIS) based on Internet as a promising research and application field is widely applied in almost all kinds of industries in society and also brings some approaches to disseminate, access and share geographic information. However, current GIS architecture relies heavily on centralized servers, which makes it incompetent to fulfil various requirements of GIS applications under open, complicated and distributed computing environment. In this paper, we explore the techniques of enabling GIS services in a P2P environment to overcome the inherent shortcomings of current GISs. By fitting Web services and P2P technologies into GIS, more flexibility and autonomy are added to GIS Web services, and the inherent limitations of centralized systems are alleviated to some degree. In the paper, we present our ongoing project BP-GServices, i.e., GIS Web services built on BestPeer, and some key techniques of implementation.