A beginner's guide to building an intranet-based GIS

Why internet/intranet technology?
When you look at the sheer volume of information stored by corporations today—including reams of printed information like computer documentation, procedures, specifications, and reference documents-you quickly see the argument for taking information on-line. Intranets are already being used by many companies to deliver private corporate information to internal users. An intranet is any internal network (LAN or WAN) that supports Internet applications— primarily web (hypertext transfer protocol), but also other applications such as FTP (file transfer protocol). Typically, a network must have TCP/IP connectivity before an intranet is possible. If a network has TCP/IP, web servers and browsers that work the same way they do on the World- Wide Web can easily be installed. The following corporate information resources and transactions are potential candidates for an intranet.

Documents
Every major company has reams of business information that it must distribute to internal employees or external customers and suppliers. Examples of the types of documents that companies traditionally distribute follow:

Policy and procedure manuals
Quality manuals
1S0 9000 work instructions
Employee benefits programs
Orientation materials
Software user guides
Hardware manuals
Quick reference guides
On-line help
Style guides and other standards
Training manuals and tutorials
Seminars
Company newsletters and announcements
Scheduling information
Maps and schematic drawings
Computer reports
Customer data
Sales and marketing literature
Specifications
Price lists
Product catalogs
Press releases.

Electronic Resources

Test data
Customer data
Spreadsheet templates
Documentation templates
Software applications and utilities
Programmer toolkit components

Interactive Communication

Surveys and feedback
Program notification and enrollment
Progress inquiries and reporting
Memo distribution, comment, and reply
Spontaneous data entry and data collection
Interactive database queries
Product promotion and ordering

In the past, many of these resources may have been hidden away in rarely accessed cavities of the network or were unavailable electronically. The new technology gives us a way to catalog these resources on-line for user review and automatically distribute them to any authorized user. The new technology gives us ways to communicate with employees, customers, or suppliers; present information that requires feedback; capture the feedback; and process the feedback data automatically through databases or scripting mechanisms. It also supports spontaneous user searches of information archives or databases.

Intranet Architecture
The architecture for setting up an Internet/Intranet to facilitate in the distribution of spatial data is basically quite simple. Three components are necessary:

The Data and Data Server
The Web Application and Web Server
The Client Application and Client.