Integrating Web services into map image applications

Web services have been opening a wide avenue for software integration. We have reported our experiments with three applications that are built by utilizing and providing Web services for geographic information systems (GIS). The services are designed to handle a large number of concurrent requests. It is clear that performance has to be the central consideration in design of GIS Web services. The lessons learned from these experiments include the application of the rich metadata message approach, choosing large size of unstructured data but limiting the structured message's sizes, and minimizing COTS software customization.