TECHNOLOGICAL PRINCIPLES AND MAPPING APPLICATIONS OF WEB GIS

The rapid development of the modern technologies all over the world requires new strategies for planning the best solutions in web mapping. Before this progress to be accomplished, manually drawn maps were upgraded to computer generated once using Geographic Information Systems. Eventually GIS maps started moving from the desktop part to the World Wide Web and big GIS vendors started making the first frameworks for online maps. It can be claimed that computers are the key to evolution in all application fields in our society, especially as a turning tool in "Innovation Cartography". Up-to-date topics about modern mapping include web GIS technological principles about server-side technologies, geospatial standarts, and protocols, along with their implementations. Also, from a scientific perspective, having a powerful knowledge base of how to use map projections and spatial databases, having a long-term experience with gathering, generalizing and visualizing the geospatial data to specific scales, having useful observations of the nicities of placing labels on the map, having a work-based practical experience in setting up a server that will serve the map, and many others, are of great importance. Web GIS applications are widely usable and helpful in many areas like the military defense, environment conservation, tourism development, disaster management, educational purposes, and so on. This paper contributes to the understanding of the web GIS architecture and its main technological principles, describing the characteristics of the proprietry and free software applications, giving the methodological principles for creation of an efficient fast functional web GIS application, and accessing the thematic web GIS content according to the specific needs of users.