Customer Service, Profit, and the Internet
To illustrate how effectively the Web can be used, consider a simple service that a utility wants to provide:
Call Befotc You Dig. Today the customer calls, giving name and address, and is then provided with a map,
perhaps by fax. A utility with an AM/FM solution could provide this as an automated service on the Web.
One of two architectures could be used standard HTML or plug-ins. In both cases the user navigates to the
utility’s Web home page (equivalent to the main switchboard for routing incoming customer calls). There
the customer chooses Call Before You Dig, enters the appropriate address, and receives the information.
This concept can be demonstrated using a tie Web service. A popular search facility on the Web can be
found at Mfp:hww.lycos.corn (Figure 1). On the home page is a button labeled Roud Maps. Clicking it
tells the Lycos Web server to send the address tequest form to the browser (Figure 2). The user Ills in the
address, which the browser sends back to the Web server. The Web server passes this on to a specialized
map server application that Lycos manages. From a national road database of the United States, the
application generates a map centered on the entered address. Because standard browsers do not understand
*Standardsare emerging that support rich text and eventually multimedia email.
**For the Whlows environment the two most popular products are NetsCape Navigator from Netscape and the
Internet Explorer from Microsoft.
spatial data, the map server converts the map into an image and sends it back to the Web server, which
sends it on to the browser for display (Figure 3).
Figure 1 Lycos Home Page
The advantage of the Lycos example is that the browser is standard. The disadvantage is that to do even a
simple spatial operation, such as panning the display, the request must be sent back to the map server (via
the Web server), which generates the image, which is then routed back to the browser for display. No local
processing occurs; the browser is acting as a very thin client.
The alternative approach is to have a spatial plug-in that supports the spatial operations needed within the
browser. In this scenario the map server sends back spatial data (e.g., vectors) which can then be displayed,
panned, and zoomed+wsuming that ‘suftlcient’ data is sent. Network trafllc is reduced, as well as the
processing needs of both the Web and map servers. The design must trade off the amount of extra data sent
(in anticipation of future requests) against the extra time required to retrieve and send the data from the
database.
Many vendors are starting to provide client-side spatial support. These take two forms: for direct end users,
the plug-in is used ‘out-of-the-box’ with customization restricted to controlling data types and extents being
transmitted. A more flexible approach is to provide the services as programmatic libraries from which
developers can create specialized plug-ins in a language such as Java.
Figure 2. Address Request Form
Figure 3 The Map Result
