A Method for Developing Plug-and-Play Web GIS

Abstract

Web GIS is one of the hot topics today. Because of its professional characteristic, a Web GIS application often requires complicated configuration before it can be used. In this paper, a method to develop pre-configured plug-and-play Web GIS is presented for saving the energy and time needed by the installation, configuration, and maintenance of Web GIS. According to the method, two systems, original system and memory running system are set up on a USB flash drive. A Web GIS integrated environment is founded on the USB flash drive as original system and the memory running system runs as a mirror of the USB flash drive original system. The memory running system is deployed into RAM from USB flash drive during system boot process using tmpfs and initrd. Operating system, applications and geo-spatial data are totally in RAM to offer good performance, and the erase cycles limitation of USB flash drive is overcome by this way. System updates are realized through the USB flash drive original system and then applied to the memory running system. To verify the validity of this method, a plug-and-play Web GIS prototype was developed based on Debian GNU/Linux. The prototype combines Linux, Web GIS, tmpfs (a ramdisk mechanism in Linux) and initrd technique into a Web GIS integrated environment that can be used to publish geo-spatial data efficiently on different computers through USB interface. The actual operation on different PC servers indicates the prototype is very efficient. With steady improvements in price, capacity, speed of USB flash drive and RAM, this method is expected to be widely applied.