HTML and multimedia Web GIS

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a platform-independent method of identifying a document's structure and references. The Web is a distributed hypertext multimedia information service that has brought millions of non-academic and academic users to the Internet. In constrast to traditional GIS, multimedia Web GIS is not only able to collect, analyze and store data in traditional formats i.e. text, images and graphs but also audio, animations and video, using all the techniques, advantages and multimedia facilities of the Web. This paper explains multimedia data and the advantages of multimedia GIS (MMGIS) over traditional GIS. HTML plays a robust role in the development of the multimedia Web GIS. Through HTML our multimedia Web GIS can be viewed in three different categories. These are Static Web GIS, Dynamic Web GIS, and Active Web GIS. These three broad categories are also discussed.