Web GIS: Principles and Applications, 1st ed., by Pinde Fu and Jiulin Sun, Redlands, CA, ESRI Press, 2011, 312 pp., US$55.95, paperback, ISBN 9781589482456
This book on Web Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provides a comprehensive and timely examination of Web GIS that has become widely developed and used in numerous domains across academia, government, and industry. With decades of experiences in geographic information science and geospatial technologies, Drs. Fu and Sun are well qualified to contribute such a book to this fast-growing technology and related research areas.
The book consists of 10 chapters that can be classified into the following 5 categories: (1) Chapters 1 and 2: background and technical basics of Web GIS; (2) Chapters 3 and 4: geospatial web services and mashups; (3) Chapters 5–7: user environments and related infrastructure; (4) Chapters 8 and 9: applications in business and government; and (5) Chapter 10: hot topics and future directions. Through this organization of contents, the authors aim to reach out to both lay audience and GIS professionals. A series of lab exercises are suggested to those who would be interested in adopting the book in classroom settings.
The coverage of the book on the relationships between Web services and the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) is worth noting. Service-oriented architecture is elaborated in the context of NSDI. Connections made among NSDI, cloud computing, and volunteered geographic information are particularly of interest. The authors contend that NSDI 2.0 is based on Web services as the private sector and individual citizens become more engaged in data collection and sharing services, which resonates well with the emergence of spatial cyberinfrastructure (Wright and Wang Citation2011).
While ESRI ArcGIS server technologies are extensively referenced to illustrate concepts and technical details, the book keeps a good balance between ESRI solutions and other related technologies and standards for addressing the broad and rich context of Web GIS. Related to this balance, a large collection of use case examples based in concrete real-world scenarios are interwoven together with specific technical discussions throughout the entire book, which is helpful to various readers to grasp many technical threads covered in the book.
In addition to a standalone chapter on hot topics and new frontiers, the authors have a section on challenges and prospects within each Chapter from 4 to 9. This style of forward thinking is effective for characterizing Web GIS as a dynamic subfield crossing many technological and research themes. Furthermore, to keep readers in a constant mode of futuristic thinking is a good way to motivate the learning of Web GIS and may provoke critical thinking about related future research directions such as CyberGIS (Wang Citation2010).
Overall, the contents of this book strike an interesting balance of technical approaches, principles, and concepts of Web GIS. References and study questions at the end of each chapter are useful, in particular for introductory or intermediate GIS courses focusing on Web GIS. The book may also be used in general for gaining a comprehensive exposure to this important and rapidly evolving technology.
Shaowen Wang
CyberInfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory, Department of Geography and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Urbana, IL, USA
Email: [email protected]
© 2011, Shaowen Wang
Related Research Data
References
- Wang , S. 2010 . A CyberGIS framework for the synthesis of cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis . Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 100 ( 3 ) : 535 – 557 .
- Wright , D.J. and Wang , S. 2011 . The emergence of spatial cyberinfrastructure . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , 108 ( 14 ) : 5488 – 5491 .