A Prototype for Wrapping and Visualizing Geo-Referenced Data

This paper proposes a prototype for integration and visualization ofgeo-referenced information (GRI) in a distributed environment i general and World Wide Web in particular. This prototype adopts a three-tier architecture and includes three main components: GRI wrapper for distributed GRI web sites, GRI integration mediator and client side visualization i terface. In this prototype, XML is used as a communication protocol between distributed web sites that provide GRI and the mediator, and between the mediator and clients. Java Servlets are written to translate data in distributed websites into XML documents. Data in distributed websites can be stored in a flat file, relational database, object-oriented database or object-relational database. Java Servlet in the mediator server etrieves data from related istributed websites in an XML format upon a request from the client side, parses the retrieved XML documents, performs merge or other operations on the retrieved XML documents obuild a new XML document and sends it to the client side. When the client side gets the requested data from the mediator server, it will parse the returned XML document and draw it inside the browser window by using a Java applet