Putting the Geographical Analysis Machine on the Internet

Introduction Currently most of the proprietary GIS software systems lack sophisticated geographical analysis technology. Attempts over the last decade to persuade the system developers to add spatial analysis functionality has so far failed to have much visible impact. The traditional arguments seemingly still apply; viz. no strong market demand, fear of statistical complexity, lack of suitable GIS-able methods, and a deficiency of statistical skills amongst the GIS system developers. Various solutions to this dilemma have been suggested and tried out; in particular the development of spatial statistical add-ons tied to this or that GIS and the development of standalone statistical packages with either basic GIS functionality or easy linkage to one or more GIS systems. The problem is that these systems mainly serve research needs whereas most of the potential end-users of geographical analysis methods are not researchers in academia but involve the far larger numbers of globa