Enhancing Information Portals with Internet-based GIS

The advancement of Internet technologies and geographical information systems (GIS) have opened up new opportunities for the application of Internet-based GIS in the context of information and knowledge management. Based on the observation that almost every type of information resource has some geographical relationship this paper introduces how GIS can be used as search components in information portals to search for multi-referenced information resources (i.e., resources with several relationships such as temporal, thematic and geographical relationships). In addition, the applicability of geographical maps for displaying search results containing large numbers of hits is presented. Finally, the system architecture of our current prototype is described which allows the integration of arbitrary holdings with GIS.