PrintWe all know that geospatial technology is widely utilized to support various applications including asset management, emergency management, managing natural resources, assessing taxes, and designing entire highway systems. While spatial data and related technology is applicable to hundreds of commercial applications, businesses are only now realizing the need to build enterprise geospatial systems and to spatially enable the existing data. Geospatial information has become an integral part of the IT infrastructure at all levels of industry. Having traditional GIS enter the age of the Internet with its inherent very thin client, geospatial systems now are moving away from the tradition architectures and embrace a new architecture suitable for enterprise applications. There is a pressing need to introduce architectures for spatial technologies operating in this environment. This can only be successfully done by adapting and using methods to ensure the creation of a solid infrastructure foundation.
Creating a common infrastructure for an enterprise-wide geospatial system involves methods and techniques for scoping, analysis, design, implementation, and deployment. When building an enterprise-wide geospatial system, a well thought-out approach facilitates transition and application migration. It provides a consistent and reliable way to interface to external systems; increased application availability and performance; reduction in failure; load balancing; scalability; security; legacy system support; and last but not least, support for your clients.