MapBeing: An architecture for manipulating and publishing vector data in web based Geographic Information System

Web Geographic Information Systems (WebGIS) have been introduced for fulfilling the growing need of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the Internet. WebGIS can also be used to manipulate the published data according to the user´s need. However, publishing of large volume interactive vector data might degrade the performance of WebGIS, due to upload/download and rendering time. In this paper, a vector data manipulating and publishing architecture named MapBeing is proposed which provides features to manipulate and publish huge volumes of data on maps without degrading performance. The proposed architecture consists of four core layers named User End, the Request Handler, Service and Data Provider. The User End layer is constructed using an open source JavaScript library called OpenLayers which shows vector data on the interactive map presented on the web. The Request Handler layer processes data provisioning based on user interaction. GeoServer is used in the Service layer for map creation and modification and PostGIS, a Database for storing spatial data, is used as the Data Provider layer. The experiment shows that along with the ability to manipulate and publish vector data, the architecture also achieves significant amount of lower usage in user bandwidth.