ABSTRACT

The opportunities for developing digital geospatial libraries and providing global access to such data have been fuelled by the ever-increasing use of the Internet as a communication medium. The requirements addressed by the World Wide Web (WWW; the terms ‘the Internet’ and the ‘World Wide Web’ are used interchangeably in this chapter) are many:

• generating and maintaining geospatial data sets is expensive and time-consuming so sharing the data as widely as possible is important;

• data collected at local, regional and international scales require to be collated depending on the spatial focus of decision making processes;

• geospatial data from diverse sources, satellite imaging, monitoring instruments, GPS receivers etc, need to be integrated for spatiotemporal analysis.