Interactive visualisation of geographical objects on the Internet

The potential of the World Wide Web as an information distribution network has increased. The expansion of the Internet provides data suppliers with a completely new means for disseminating geospatial information in a visual and interactive manner to the general public. Recent developments indicate that the Web is gradually being transformed from a distributed document system towards a distributed application framework. Several new object-oriented techniques have been introduced as a solution for dynamic processing of information on the Web. The present paper illustrates a research project carried out at the Finnish Geodetic Institute to develop a viewer application (NetGIS) aimed at giving an ordinary Web surfer an opportunity to browse and visualise geographical information (GI) in the form of spatial objects. This new object-based approach to the delivery of GI on the Web enables interactive querying of the properties of an individual geographical object. The application is implemented in Java programming language and the data transfer is based on use of the CORBA standard and on OpenGIS Simple Features Specification.