The development of a web mapping system and its application

Abstract

Recently, there is increase interest in web mapping applications due to the increase use of mobile application, GPS, and digital mapping. The change in the web-based communities, applications and services, from Web 1.0 “read” only technologies to Web 2.0 “read”, “write” and “build” technologies opened a new heaven for public usage and applications. Neogeography (also called Volunteered Geographic Information), came with the increase interest in online mapping and in using geospatial technologies in diverse applications. The development started by mashing up various web resources to create maps. This has improved the web mapping/GIS services despite some difficulties. The open source initiative came (Minnesota Mapserver, GDAL/OGR, GRASS GIS and PostgreSQL/PostGIS packages), in order to offer a technically competitive and open-source alternative solution to the commercial software for web mapping and GIS system applications. GIS and mapping software companies have developed certain development kits that could be used to build a complete GIS and web mapping applications at a very low cost, They also offer a large wide library to be used in developing GIS applications. In this work, we used one of these applications (AspMap) in order to develop our web mapping software. AspMap is a set of high-performance Web mapping components and controls for embedding maps in ASP.NET and ASP.NET AJAX applications. AspMap gives the ability to generate maps, thematic mapping, routing, vehicle tracking and other features that are generated on the server to make maps fully interactive on the client-side. AspMap provides the functionality needed by the user. In this paper, we present a new web-based system named, JOFAST, in order to provide desktop navigation (shortest path), tracking, locating land parcels, distance calculation, map creation, among others. The system is flexible, efficient, easy to use and cost-effective and it is in use now in the city of Amman in Jordan.