Overview

Interoperable web mapping is about sharing data across organizations, platforms and formats in order to create new solutions to old problems.

It's an infrastructure which cuts through the complexity of on-line data, allowing precision queries and user-tailored solutions.

It's about leveraging the value of your data assets and extending your user base by attracting clients to a pool of shared data.

It's about getting a more holistic view of sectors -from roads to health, from emergencies to environment.

Web mapping creates maps and other geo-information on the web. And does it in such detail, that organisation of services, decision support, coping with emergencies, and a whole array of other activities, are made faster and more efficient.

Web mapping is backed by a globally agreed set of open standards that will see the rapid rise of a whole new industry. The geographic data industry. Standards will enable products to be interoperable, massively increasing participation, and hence business.

Web mapping then dynamically integrates multiple distributed on-line data sources into one or several map images that visually communicate regional, national or international interactions over the web.

Features:

• A strict separation of data, logic and display, allowing for re-useable and interchangeable components
• Distributed, information sources. Connect to networked data and services anywhere - you no longer need to store it all in-house.
• The use of globally agreed Open Standard Interfaces between the components enables vendor- and platform independence.
• Integration of diverse information types: maps, documents, contact directories, metadata, multimedia etc.

Social Change's web mapping Services solution architecture empowers you to value add your own (geographic) data with related online information. You can:

• Search for online sources such as weather maps, traffic data, background maps or satellite images.
• Fuse these with your local (e.g. spreadsheet) data and display on you desktop, web site or WAP-display.
• Scan your documents, emails or directories for geographic references and link them to a map.
• Make any data collection geographically searchable using global metadata standards. Find all documents referring to a specific region.

Social Change Online achieves dynamic integration of multiple distributed on-line data sources using the web mapping Services model.

These services cooperate to create images that visually communicate regional, national or international relationships over the web. Standard, off-the-shelf software components provide vendor independent, plug-and-play functionality.

Our approach allows access to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of digital maps and satellite images that until now have been locked away from the Internet.

If you are a data provider, it allows you to tap into new and larger markets. If you are a data user, the amount of data available to you mushrooms.

The major benefits to your organisation and product are:

• flexibility,
• scalability,
• real time access to external data,
• highly increased suability,
• major cuts in development time and considerable cost reductions.

How is this useful?:

• Government agencies can easily adopt a whole of government approach to service delivery.
• Emergency management can be dealt with much more efficiently.
• Primary health care can easily draw on an exponentially increasing number of data sources, yet still be user tailored.
• Environmental decision makers, be they government, non-government organisations or the public will, for the first time, have access to the sort of integrated information they need to make quality decisions.

It means wider participation by all, and hence emerging markets.

How does it work?

Our flagship product, WebMap Composer, with its MapBroker middle ware, is the melting pot for geographic and related data from distributed sources. WebMap Composer builds the spatial portal into which MapBroker delivers distributed content. Data is rendered into interactive maps accessible via the web using any browser.

The MapBroker package provides the engine behind various spatial applications built by Social Change Online. They range from health care to river flow management, wildlife sightings and intelligence analysis.

Combine just about any kind of data from both internal and external, distributed data sources:

• Database content
• Text documents
• Email collections
• Newsfeeds
• Street addresses
• Census data
• Maps and GIS data
• Multimedia

WebMap Composer is a new product for building spatial portals.

Custom user interfaces previously built for MapBroker can now be built with WebMap Composer's visual IDE (Integrated Development Environment), hugely saving development time. MapBroker is bundled with WebMap Composer as a single product.

WebMap Composer can integrate specialised online services, for example mapping data with street addresses (geocoding), or locating place names (gazetteers).

© Social Change Online, Australia
webmap@socialchange.net