Maintenance of Geospatial data, to date, is mostly performed using desktop applications, dominated by proprietary solutions from ESRI, InterGraph, Bentley Systems and others. Looking around the technology corner, web-based Geospatial data editing is the future.
In 1996, when Geosystems Global Corporation launched mapquest.com, the way people obtained street maps and directions changed forever. The days where Geospatial Information Systems are dominated by desktop applications provided by only a handful of vendors for use by a narrow professional club of geographers, cartographers, engineers and planners were counted. The internet revolution and the open source software development revolution have finally started to make this more specialized field of information technology more widely available. Aivolution is at the forefront of this exciting development.
Not all challenges have been met. While it is now trivial to disseminate geospatial information over the internet, using web-based map viewers such as Google Maps or OpenLayers, or using 3D-Globe viewers like Google Earth, the maintenance of geospatial information using web-based toolchains is still very much a work in progress. The benefits of web technology for Geospatial Information Systems are as huge as they have been for Information Technology at large. Web-based applications require little or no disk space on the client, upgrade automatically with new features, integrate easily into other server-side web procedures, such as email and searching. They also provide cross-platform compatibility in most cases (i.e., Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) because they operate within a web browser window.
Building on open source technologies, Aivolution is actively working on making web-based Geospatial data maintenance a reality. Q4 2010, Aivolution will launch an exciting suite of web-based, GPL licensed open-source technologies:
- Spatial Machines Map Viewer
- Spatial Machines Map Server
- Spatial Machines Map Editor
- Spatial Machines Difference Engine
