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of the Web to become spatially-intelligent, in the sense of being able to understand and
respond to requests for geographically specific information and in being aware of the location
of individuals. Furthermore, the distributed infrastructure of the Internet, on which the Web is
based, can enhance the effectiveness of the traditional in-house GIS. This is reflected in the
possibility of world-wide access to geographic data and to remote geographic data processing
facilities and in allowing members of an organization to retrieve and maintain geographical
information from multiple locations, whether office or field-based.
From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, the facility to display images was
exploited to present maps which provide geographical context to information. A very early
interactive map server was developed by Xerox Parc and used by many services to display
simple web maps. Businesses often use maps on the Web to show their location, while news
agencies such as the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/) use maps to help people understand where
events are taking place. Websites such as the BBC are constantly being updated, but new
items referred to on the home page will often include maps. The simplest types of web map
are static, non-interactive images, and this is the norm for these contextual maps. The standard
facilities of HTML, the original mark-up language for web documents, can, however, be used
to provide some degree of interactivity, whereby the map includes clickable icons, or hot
spots, which provide hyperlinks to information about the highlighted location or map symbol.
Tourist maps such as those of Paris (http://www.paris.org/Maps/MM/) and
Washington DC (http://maps/mapnetwork.com/wctc/dispmap.asp?map=1) contain such
hyperlinks which lead to further web pages containing text and images, and sometimes more
maps, relating, for example, to museums and monuments. A variation on the use of clickable
hot spots is to provide pull-down menus that allow the user to select some particular type of
associated information. This is found on the web map of the London underground transport
system (http://www.visitlondon.com/ tubeguru/), in which users can point to stations on a
map and select menu items about timetables and associate transport networks.
2. Answer the questions:
1. How did World Wide Web influence GIS?
2. What applications of GIS in WWW do you know?
3. What was the first interactive map server?
4. How is GIS used in tourism?
3. Give the English equivalents from Text 11:
Глобальна мережа зв’язку, технологія програмування, засоби зв’язку, відкритий
доступ, інформаційна служба, розвиток, гіпотетичний, інтерактивні види послуг,
обладнання, туристична мапа, система підземного транспорту.
4. Fill in the blanks with the words from the following text:
1. GIS were dominated until the early 2000s by the creation of __________ and
geographic data resources.
2. In the context of GIS these __________ are being exploited in several ways.
3. Many types of information are geographically referenced and most services have a
__________.
4. From the earliest days of the World Wide Web, the facility to display images was
exploited to present maps which provide __________ to information.
5. The simplest types of web map are static, __________, and this is the norm for
these contextual maps.
GRAMMAR FOCUS