GIS-based Web-Service Architecture

The present research addresses the system design for building a geospatially-based web services application for mobile users. In recent years, geospatial information(GI) and Geographic Information Systems(GIS) are significant resources in decision-making analyses at various levels of society and activities. Recently, the integration of GIS and web services, called GIS web services, provides the wider implementation of GIS. At the present time, accessing, presenting, and manipulating updatedgeospatial information to locate geo-related facility services are real challenges related to application developers to implement for foot-travelers properly. The present paper investigates how the web services work in a GIS for discovering geo-related facility services such as a restaurant and post office in the user's vicinity. Thus, a prototype, with an architecture consisting of a windows application on the client side as well as facility services and geo-engineon the server side, were designed and implemented with the proposed GIS web services platform. On both the client and server sides, visual studio .Net technology was used. A geo-engine on the server side was also built with ESRI's MapObjects. Following successful implementation of the prototype presented in this study, the mobile user is able to invoke remote web services to assess the location of various facilities such as restaurants. Moreover, the present research demonstratesthat web services are not restricted only to web-based use, but can also be utilized by any web-connected application.