GIS managers traditionally consider three perspectives of the nature of GIS when introducing GIS into an organization. When the GIS is developed to address focused and well de® ned problems of the organization, these perspectives adequately describe the changing identities of GIS in the study of its di€ usion. However when the GIS is developed to address strategic, but vaguely de® ned problems,...

The need for global access and decentralized management of geographic information is pushing the GIS community to establish an open GIS architecture and provide distributed geographic information services. From an operational perspective, the role of client/server components underlie specification of task-oriented programming, and the modularization of GIS software. Exchange of geographic infor...

The GIS literature abounds with strategies to guide the development of a corporate GIS as a single project but lacks discussion on the long term management of the GIS. This paper documents a recent study into GIS development in a state department over an 18-year period. It applies the productional perspective of GIS to model long term GIS development diagrammatically and identiŽ es Ž ve pattern...

To simulate dynamic soft geo-objects and reflect geoscientific laws, the authors discuss the characteristics, mathematical expression, parameter representation and rendering of GIS Flow Element (FE) and GIS Soft Voxel (SV). The simulation and rendering algorithms of GIS FE and GIS SV are based on particle system and metaball technology in computer graphics. The main differences are that GIS FE ...

The aim of this paper is to understand the social use and the consequences of PGIS in local communities, more specifically in Sierra Nevada, Mexico. In order to investigate the use of ICT by communities, we applied a multilevel and structurationist framework that articulates three dimensions: context, process and content. The results of our study draw attention to the implications of using PGIS...

As GIS implementations mature and GIS use expands beyond the current core GIS community the need to discover and disseminate GIS capabilities grows. The Internet and the age of distributed computing provide the technical framework on which distributed GIS is built. As key application of distributed GIS, geoportals provide a gateway to discover and access geographic Web services. Four key geopor...