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Jim Baumann International Marketing Writer/Editor, ESRI Inc. jbaumann@esri.com As Web GIS emerges as a platform for both social and business- driven interactions, organisations are finding they can leverage that architecture to mash up authoritative content with user-generated content to deliver location-based information and applications to a much broader audience. For example, Web maps could be created to determine the potential impact that a wildfire, earthquake, or flood might have on homes and property, which would provide  the opportunity to take preventive action or help to effect policy change. Emergency response officials can use that same Web GIS application and add their own data on top of it to analyse and plan how to respond to worst-case scenarios, including optimised routing of personnel and equipment and devising alternative evacuation routes for populations at risk. Local governments can now efficiently provide a way for their constituents to browse property information or parcel records online or inform residents about upcoming street maintenance projects that will impact neighbourhood traffic. Common to all these examples is the need for ready-to-use, current, and accurate basemap data that sometimes has to be available on short notice and onto which proprietary data can be easily overlaid, or mashed up, in order to provide information in a useful and meaningful context. Until recently, mashups have been thought of primarily as Web applications that aggregate data feeds from multiple Web services into a simple and often social or consumer-oriented Web application. Now, many organisations realise that mashups can be useful for conducting business and providing critical information and functionality to their users and business partners, either over the Web or through internal distribution. For the GIS industry, Web GIS allows extensive sharing of maps and data and opens up access to GIS applications to everyone. This, together with the growing availability of georeferenced content and the ability to easily search, discover, and mash up these services, will drive the development of new patterns for GIS deployment. These patterns will emphasise open and interoperable services and a standards-based Web-oriented architecture that can be used to support a broad array of geographically related applications. ESRI's ArcGIS Server 9.3 improves an organisation's ability to publish a variety of services for maps, data, imagery, spatial analytics, and mobile projects. ArcGIS users can now publish their own GIS content, which can be consumed in nearly any custom viewer or popular consumer mapping application. This allows the mashup of information from rich GIS databases or common consumer basemaps with powerful GIS analysis tools. In addition, every ArcGIS Server includes a services directory that can be indexed and crawled by Web search engines, allowing another way to discover and present spatial data opportunities. In this way, ArcGIS Server becomes the foundation for Web GIS. For example, open Microsoft Metadirectory Services can be scraped off server sites, served up in the KML OpenService, and integrated into consumer/Web mapping environments. Supported Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), standards including Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Transactional Web Feature Service (WFST) provide open and flexible solutions for open source mapping application development. Also, ArcGIS Server JavaScript and Flex APIs allow rapid mashup development of Web content with other GIS services. Developing these Web GIS environments greatly expands the use of location-based data and allows GIS professionals to distribute their own data and applications to a much wider audience, while those using consumer mapping applications are provided with the opportunity to incorporate spatial datasets and GIS capabilities without having to become GIS experts. In addition, this wider access to new data sources helps to ensure that the data requested is the most up-to-date and accurate information available. Because ArcGIS Server technology provides organisations with the ability to manage and deploy Web services for mapping, data management, and geospatial analytics, organisations can more easily leverage their internal GIS resources, as well as services hosted on other GIS servers, and put them to work in a new pattern of mashup-the enterprise mashup. Enterprise mashups combine internal and external data sources in order to solve very specific problems and closely match the types of relationships, workflows, and project administration that need to be supported on a daily basis. Page 1 of 1
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