Descriptive Modeling of the Web Mapping Systems Users Behavior

Web mapping systems and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in general are widely used nowadays. However, there is a lack of models that describe how users interact with this kind of application and the workload imposed on servers. These models are important for performance evaluation and to direct the focus of the development to the points that will affect the most used operations and the most users of the system. In this paper, we propose a descriptive model of the web mapping systems users’ behavior. The model can be used as a starting point for the creation of workload generators to make performance evaluations in this kind of application. As a case study we created a workload generator and we applied it in a web tile server. We show that adding user features can significantly change the workload imposed on the server.