Building distributed web GIS: a mobile-agent based approach

The diversity of GISs and the wide-spread availability of WWW have led to an increasing amount of research on integrating a variety of heterogeneous and autonomous GISs in a cooperative environment to construct a new generation of GIS characterizing in open architecture, distributed computation, interoperability, and extensibility. Our on-going research project MADGIS (Mobile Agent based Distributed Geographic Information System) is reported, in which we propose the architecture of MADGIS to meet the requirements of integrating distributed GIS applications under Internet environment. We first describe the architecture of MADGIS, and detailed discussions focusing on the structure of client site, server site and mobile agent in MADGIS. Then we explore key techniques for MADGIS implementation.