Online Cartography with XML

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses online maps, which are increasingly becoming interactive representations from distributed information systems where multimedia spatial content is shared, combined, and styled for particular audiences and uses. This revolutionary change in Internet cartography has a lot to do with the advances in distributed computing, specifically the introduction of Extensible Markup Language (XML) and related technologies. The chapter reviews the principal technologies, experiences, and prospects of XML-based online cartography: the emerging XML standards for encoding spatial data, and their use for spatial data interchange and distributed mapping; the new XML-based languages for two-dimensional (2D) vector rendering, and their use in Web mapping; the use of XML for managing, browsing, and harvesting cartographic metadata, in support of spatial data infrastructure, spatial query processing, and information integration; and mapping applications based on the emerging XML Web Services standards. While providing an overview of XML based approaches and XML uses in Web cartography by a variety of vendors, it also highlights the experience in XML-based spatial data integration, and in the development of AxioMap (Application of XML for Interactive Online Mapping) software.