A framework with tools for designing web-based geographic applications

Many Web-based geographic applications have been developed in various domains, such as tourism, education, surveillance and military. However, developing such applications is a cumbersome task because it requires several types of components (e.g., maps, contents, indexing services, databases) that have to be assembled together. Hence, developers have to deal with different technologies and application behavior models. In order to create Web-based geographic applications and overcome these design problems, we propose a framework composed of three complementary tasks: identifying some desired data, building the graphical layout organization and defining potential user interactions. According to this framework, we have specified a unified model and we have encoded it using Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF. Through a prototype named WINDMash, we have implemented some tools that instantiate our model and automatically generate concrete Internet geographic applications that can be executed on Web browsers.