Distributed geographic information querying approach based on mobile agent

GIS based on Internet as a promising research field brings opportunities and challenges to geographic information accessing, sharing and disseminating. However, the inherent limitation of current Internet GIS architecture based on connection makes it incompetent to fulfill various requirements of GIS applications under dynamic, complicated and distributed computing environment such as the mobile Internet. As a developed paradigm in distributed computing, mobile agent can especially benefit (mobile) Internet applications on providing asynchronous task execution and more dynamics, supporting flexible and extensible cooperation, reducing communication bandwidth, enhancing real time abilities and higher degree of robustness, enabling offline processing and disconnected operation. This paper presents a mobile agent based approach to query distributed geographic information, which can overcome the drawbacks of the traditional connection-based access method. A prototype was implemented to access distributed geographic information transparently by using Aglets, which is a free mobile agent development platform developed by IBM.