THE CARNET WEBGIS PROJECT - CROATIAN GEOGRAPHICAL DATA ONLINE

Z.Zmijarevic, D.Skrlec, S.Krajcar

University of Zagreb,

Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing,

Department of Power Systems

Unska 3, Zagreb HR-10000, Croatia

http://www.fer.hr/webgis

KEYWORDS: GIS, WWW, Internet

A lot of crucial information, especially in communication and computer networks, utilities or transportation networks is geographically referenced. With GIS we can input, store, manipulate, analyze and display such information, but only to a limited group of users. Internet development and expansion enabled a new way of providing and accessing data on a global scale. Soon after the World Wide Web emerged on the Internet, the first effort to use it as a mean of creating and presenting geographical data had been made. Today, the World Wide Web with its graphical environment, interactive nature (CGI, client and server scripting, etc.), real-time database access and programming possibilities exhibits promising features for interactive map creation based on user needs. The Faculty of electrical engineering and computing in Zagreb and the Croatian Academic and Research Network (CARNet) started a joint project called the CARNet Web-GIS project. The Web-GIS project originally had three goals. The first goal was to determine the present state of interactive use and usage of maps and GIS on the Web. The second goal was to identify features of an "ideal" Web server for such purposes. And finally, the third goal was to establish an experimental WebGIS database and a WebGIS server with information on important CARNet communication nodes in Zagreb and Croatia. The current goals of this ongoing project are to review state-of-the-art solutions and maintain a GIS oriented Web site that demonstrates the possibilities of GIS on the Web. This poster will present results and conclusions of our pilot project including our research methodology.