David J. Maguire

The emergence of geoportals and their role in spatial data infrastructures

Abstract Geoportals are World Wide Web gateways that organize content and services such as directories, search tools, community information, support resources, data and applications. This paper traces the emergence of geoportals, outlining the significance of developments in enterprise GIS and national spatial data infrastructures (SDIs), with particular reference to the US experience. Our objectives are principally pedagogic, in order to relate the development of geoportals to SDI initiatives and to review recent technological breakthroughs––specifically the development of direct access facilities for application services and metadata records, and the facility to utilize services directly from conventional desktop GIS applications. We also discuss the contributions that geoportals and SDI have made to simplifying access to GI, and their contribution to diffusing GI concepts, databases, techniques and models. Finally, the role of geoportals in electronic government (e-Government) is considered.

Geographic information portals––a UK perspective

This paper presents a review and interpretation of the development of geoportals in the United Kingdom. We describe the sources and levels of UK central government support for e-government, and the ways in which these have been used, alongside existing sources of spatial framework data, to develop geoportals. We then summarise the salient technical and organisational characteristics of geoportals that have been created at the local, regional and national scales, before assessing the state-of-play in the development of geoportals and evaluating future prospects.

Distributed and Mobile Computing

Technology is moving rapidly to the point where computing will be available everywhere, will be fully mobile, and will provide access to widely distributed resources. This trend to itinerant, distributed, and ubiquitous computing is the latest in a long series of major architectural changes, with associated implications for where computing is performed. Production of geographic data is similarly moving to a new set of arrangements focused on local agencies and individuals. These changes are placed within an economic framework, as a basis for development of a new set of theoretical principles regarding the location of computing, and its implications for geographic information science. Digital libraries are a further instance of these trends, with associated implications for the spatial organization of libraries. The chapter ends by identifying a series of research issues, and the benefits that can be anticipated if these issues are solved.