The Design and Development of a Hypertext Navigation System for Geospatial Web Content

With the advent of the World Wide Web (WWW), the way people publish, retrieve and synthesise information has totally changed. The Web is a hypertext system consisting of a huge amount of information which has very different forms. The concept of geospatial Web content emphasises the geospatial context of online information. Due to the continued explosive increase in the volume and complexity of geospatial Web content, it is necessary to have some mechanisms through which content can be systematically organised depending on their geospatial characteristics, and can be efficiently accessed and interrelated. This paper presents the design and development of Geo-coded Spatial Navigation System (G-SNS), a hypertext navigation system that aims to provide an integrated user interface for navigation and browsing of geospatial Web content. Three case studies based on the G-SNS architecture in different application domains are developed and described: 1) Web Sites Finder enables users to find Web sites that are close to users’ current locations, 2) Property List Map provides users with a map-based interface for searching and reviewing of real estate properties, and 3) Local News Reader categorises online news stories based on their geospatial context.