Service Oriented Architecture (soa) Based Web Services for Geographic Information Systems

Geographic Information System (GIS) has long been essential tool for governments, environmental institutions, military and others who depend on geographic information. GIS combines layers of data about a location to create a fuller and more accurate picture of that location. These data are obtained from different sources in different formats, datum and coordinate systems. The problem of traditional GIS is to gather all up-to-date data and to process them in the same format and datum. The Internet has changed rapidly the transfer and dissemination of geographical information. This rapid and enormous development of the Internet technology resulted in usage of the Internet as a tool for data access, data transmission and access to GIS analysis tools. The combination of GIS and the Internet offers great possibilities, such as the interactive access to geospatial data, enhancement of the functions of geographic information, and the access to GIS analysis tools. As a result of advancements in both technologies, Web services come into view based on Service Oriented Architecture. Web services let applications share data and even use other applications’ capabilities, without regard to what operating system or platform those applications run on. * Corresponding author.