Building web services for public sector information and the geospatial web

The use of commercial geobrowsers, such as Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth, has dominated developments of geospatial web services. This popularity is driven by the capabilities to provide continuous visualization of the Earth’s surface for searching and viewing information. This is also an important requirement for disseminating public sector information; but governments have been slow to take advantage of geobrowser technology as they face technical and information ownership issues. We identify requirements to support web mapping of public sector information, these include: i) scaled geography over a variety of levels from local to global scales, and ii) efficient data processing for information retrieval within a client-server computer architecture. Through a prototype application we also explore the use of a mapping paradigm for accessing information and provision of government services. The chapter collects requirements from a state government agency to provide information for gambling licenses and related support services. A geo-enabled web application is developed for these requirements and we discuss issues for integrating services with geobrowsing technology.