Towards geoservices portals MEDIAMAPS: WGIS trends for business applications

The developments within the MEDIAMAPS project were motivated by the idea to provide small and medium companies with a solution to benefit from Web Business Geographic Applications (WBGA) advantages at an affordable price: a Webmapping application service with which the user only pays for used data and analysis processes. As one of the goals of this research was to give users the possibility to produce printed documents with spatial analysis results (maps), the main preoccupation was to find a technology allowing high-quality cartographic representation. Our interest led us towards SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), an open standard technology, official World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standard for delivering vector graphics on the Web. From the development of this tool several recurring thematic mapping and publishing aspects have come out: statistical ranges determination and related colour problems, data types and choropleth mapping, cartographic publishing rules. The MEDIAMAPS prototype shows how this kind of specific constraints can be implemented in a WGIS application.