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Recent developments in
Internet GIS  Ming-Hsiang Tsou Department of Geography, San Diego State University San Diego Email: mtsou@mail.sdsu.edu
THE YEAR 2005 is a very important year for the development
of Internet GIS. Many significant changes have taken
place in this year in terms of new technology, new services,
new infrastructures, and new users. Even though it is only
September now, and we still have three more months left, I am
pretty sure that this year (2005) will be unforgettable in the
history of Internet GIS. This paper will highlight three major
changes happened in the development of Internet GIS in 2005
and discusses its future impacts in the next decade.
THE FIRST BIG CHANGE: GIS AWARENESS The first big change comes from the GIS awareness in the general public. Two major events, the South Asia Tsunami and the Hurricane Katrina, started to wake up people how important the GIS is in order to protect our homes, our friends, and our own lives. GIS is a good teacher for us and it teaches us how to respect Nature and how to understand her actions. When viewing satellite imagery, categorizing land use data, or comparing the changes of land cover before/after the disasters, we are getting very important messages from Nature. These important messages can be received by hundreds of millions people almost immediately via Internet GIS. Many major satellite image companies (such as Digital Globe and Space Imaging) and GIS vendors (ESRI and Google) are generously offering free satellite images and GIS data/maps for the general public and the media. The general public can vividly see the changes of images caused by natural disasters and feel the devastating power of these events. Many media (TVs, newspapers) were copying these images from the Internet and then re-broadcast to hundreds of million viewers all over the world. Thank to the progress of Internet GIS technology and the World Wide Web, people can access many GIS data and maps in near real-time whenever they are available. People started understanding the power of geospatial technology because seeing is believing. I started to realize this big change of GIS awareness, when I watched the CNN news in September 2005 after the Hurricane Katrina. The director of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in U.S. told the CNN reporters specifically that the FEMA rescue efforts are heavily relying on GIS technology. It is so sad to realize that after we lost hundreds of thousands human lives (in the Tsunami event) and billions of dollar's damages (in the Hurricane Katrina event). These tragedies started to create the GIS awareness for our general pubic and everyone begins to understand that GIS is a vital technology for our society. Figure 1 shows a screen shot of the Google Earth Pro with the GIS data indicating the RedCross Shelter's location and capacity for the Hurricane Katrina relief.  Fig 1 The Google Earth Pro showing the RedCross Shelter location and capacity for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts (All materials © Google Inc.)
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