R. Lopes
The late 90s developments in internet technology had made possible to integrate new information technologies in the web. Geographic Information Technologies (GIT) are among them and different software providers made available a variety of tools to embed Geographic Information (GI) in web sites. The SIGMA team recognized the added value of this new technology and seized the opportunity developing the Atlas, Historical Cartography web-site (Atlas). This paper has the purpose of presenting the methodology used in the Atlas’s web enabling process and to explore a possible route to take advantage of recent developments in GI interoperability to improve data usability.
The development of the Atlas had been guided by the use of hierarchic administrative boundaries as the main navigation tool to historical census data. Due to this approach, a detailed data standardization process was undertaken producing a clearly defined data structure. The updatability and reliability that the system achieved makes me believe in the possible interoperability with other web-mapping systems.
The Geographic Markup Language (GML), a XML language to encode geographic information, has been developed and adopted in the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) with the intent of “providing a normative encoding for geographic information in XML that can be used for geo-spatial data interchange, and for web-based geo-spatial information networks”. Considering that the Atlas is supported in a web-mapping package that has a OGC Web Map Service compliant extension, this paper will discuss the potential benefits and problems in the use of this technology within the Atlas site.
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