Capabilities of multimedia gis

A geographical information system (GIS) is used to capture, store, retrieve, analyzed and display the spatial (locationally defined) data. In contrast to traditional GIS, multimedia GIS is not only able to collect, analyze and store the data in traditional formats i.e. text, images (pictures) and graphs but also audio (sound), animations and video (moving pictures) as well. In this paper the advantages of multimedia GIS over traditional GIS are explained. Multimedia GIS is fully capable of providing services to both technical and non-technical users and users of multimedia GIS can retain more knowledge than users of traditional GIS. It can be applied to various fields such as tourism, environment, education etc. Some implementation issues such as data updating, information retrieval and data compression etc. are also addressed. Finally, future development of MMGIS (using new multimedia technologies such as Virtual Reality and Virtual Reality Modeling Language) is discussed.