Web cartography

Web mapping is an Anglo-Saxon concept that in Spanish translates as "cartography on the web". It refers to the process of designing, applying, generating, and displaying or offering geospatial data through the World Wide Web. Web Mapping technology tries to provide this data in GML (Geographic Markup Language) format, according to the OpenGIS Consortium specifications, in order to achieve spatial data interoperability. However, and although GML is presented as the future Web language for displaying maps, currently it is still not used by most map generators such as SVG or Flash.

Formats

The currently existing formats for the presentation of vector cartography on the Web are:

• SVF (Simple Vector Format)
• DWF (Drawing Web Format)
• SWF (ShockWave Flash)
• PGML (Precision Graphics Markup Language)
• WebCGM
• VML (Vector Markup Language)
• PDF (Portable Document Format)
• SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)
• VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language)
• HGML (Hyper Graphics Markup Language)
• DrawML
• GML (Geography Markup Language)
• SHP (Shape)
• KML