SIGWEB BUILDER: UMA FERRAMENTA PARA DESENVOLVIMENTO DE SIG WEB EM AMBIENTES LIVRES E GRATUITOS

Abstract

The growing volume of georeferenced data and the interest of organizations in the distribution and presentation of this data in the Internet has led to a great demand for Web Geographic Information Systems (WebGIS) development. In general, the Web GIS are characterized by simple and intuitive interface for the presentation, manipulation and creation of maps in the Web. The easy use and availability of restricted set of the functionalities of easy understanding and assimilation by non-specialist users, has led these systems to the great acceptance by the general public. These characteristics of Web GIS make these systems the preferred way for geospatial data dissemination. Despite the simplicity and facility use, the Web GIS development process is not a trivial task, mainly when this development is based on free technologies and environment. The development for these environments requires from the developer a domain of all environment computational details that support maps publication and others Web technologies used. This difficult is because the lack of tools to help the process of development of Web GIS projects, turning this activity in a manual and tedious process. In this context, this dissertation proposes a computational tool that aims to minimize the time and effort of the Web GIS development based on free environment. The SIGWeb Builder tool allows developer to abstract technologic details of environment. This tool enables the Web GIS developers to concentrate their efforts on business logic, functionalities and presentation of the application.