
Dynamic webgis and tracking of mobile devices
Michele Ceccarelli
∗
, Francesco Cioffi
∗
, Michele Di Capua
+
∗
Research Centre on Software Technologies RCOST
University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
+
Unlimited Software s.r.l.
Centro Direzionale, IS F11, Naples, Italy
A webgis is a system to manage and deploy
spatial data and associated attributes on the
web. Usually, the data are static on the client-
side: a standard webgis application doesn’t
manage dynamic information. In this arti-
cle we illustrate a dynamic webgis: a system
architecture that is able to automatically col-
lect, manage and display dynamic geographic
information. In this way one can monitor
in real-time on the map the state of time-
evolving entities. Possible applications are
flee t tracking, environmental control, surveil-
lance. Actually the system is being applied to
flee t tracking.
1 Introduction
Every day, people us e on-line maps for a va-
riety of uses, from planning road journeys to
exploring unknown locations. A Geographic
Information System[1, 2] (GIS) is a system for
creating and managing spatial data and asso-
ciated attributes. It is a computer system ca-
pable of integrating, storing, editing, analyz-
ing, sharing, and displaying geographically-
referenced information.
Web-mapping is now one of the most simple
and widely accessible uses of GIS. A standard
webgis[8] is able to show geographic in forma-
tion on the web. In a standard webgis, the
users can b rowse the web page through the
hypertext linkage. Each web page is a static
image organized by the web developer. Static
pages are static HTML pages that are pre-
pared in advance of the request. A geograph-
ical document from a static webgis is stored
as a file and its contents are determined (and
fixed) by its author when it is created. The
GIS server returns the HTML pages to the
user (as shown in fig. 1).
This information is static: once the client
has requested and received data, these data
can change on the client, if and only if, the
client send a new request to the server (com-
mon HTTP protocol behavior). The main
drawb ack of this kind of architecture is that
every time the user wants to change or inter-
rogate the map, the server has to update the
view and send it to the user. This can create
an impression of poor interactivity, but this
architecture is not able to show the state of
an entity after it is changed.
In [6] th e advantages of webgis dynamic
ability are exploited for developing dynamic
webgis. Dynamic pages are created in re-
sponse to a users request. Each time user ac-
cesses the site he will view the different infor-
mation (depending on the request). Webgis is
dynamically linked with the sources. T his dy-
namic linkage with the sources always keeps
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