Mobile agent-based distributed geographic information systems under Internet environment

With widespread acceptance and availability of World Wide Web (WWW) technologies, a new generation of GIS emphasizing open architecture, distributed computing, mobility and interoperability has been receiving more attention. The authors propose the architectural concept of Mobile Agent-based Distributed Geographic Information System (MADGIS) for the first time to meet the requirements of GIS applications under Internet environment with limited communication bandwidth and unstable connectivity. We describe the architecture of MADGIS, and discuss the structure of mobile agent facilitator. Then we explore the key techniques for MADGIS implementation. And finally, an application prototype based on the MADGIS architecture is reported.