Guest Editorial: GIS Networks and the Marketplace

GIS, communication networks and their inter-relationship represent a fast-moving area of science and technology. The year 1992 saw the National Centre for Supercomputing (NCSA) release their Mosaic Web browser, which transformed the Internet from a research network of around 100 sites worldwide to a mass network environment. In parallel, related groups were driven by the promise of broadband communications and private wide area networks to seek to link groups of local area networks into a virtual workspace to support the needs of the spatial scientist and practitioner (Newton et al 1995). Since then the outcomes from these related developments have become a major technical driver for GIS, as for most areas of information system applications. They pose many strategic questions for GIS researchers and practitioners in determining how the Internet and the World Wide Web will shape the continuing development of GIS technology and its societal deployment. In the distributed GIS world these include: what are appropriate system architectures; what are viable new applications; and what are the implications of Web GIS for electronic commerce, and for initiatives such as the various national spatial data infrastructures? Three broad research themes stand out amongst the Australian response to these challenges. Firstly, the development of enhanced systems architectures that provide the client end-user with the visualisation capabilities expected of 'traditional' GIS. Secondly, the integration of institutional spatial data into a flexible corporate decision-support resource. Thirdly, the re-casting of spatial database and geoprocessing operations into distributed services, so that a user can buy data and processing components, as and when required. An important sub-theme of this is the issue of interoperability and the distributed sharing of spatial models within the GIS computing environment