A Service-Oriented Architecture for Progressive Transmission of Maps David Cavassana Costa 1 , Mario Meireles Teixeira 1 , Anselmo Cardoso de Paiva 1 , Claudio de Souza Baptista 2 1 Departamento de Informática – Universidade Federal do Maranhão (UFMA) Av. dos Portugueses SN – 65.085-580 – São Luis – MA – Brazil 2 Departamento de Sistemas e Computação Universidade Federal de Campina Grande (UFCG) – Campina Grande, MA – Brazil david@gia.deinf.ufma.br, {mario, paiva}@deinf.ufma.br, baptista@dsc.ufcg.edu.br Abstract. The Internet creates an environment suitable to spatial data share, allowing the users to transmit, visualize, manipulate and interact with them. This environment not only allows new opportunities for geospatial data use, but also introduces new problems that must be managed to permit these data to be used in an effective and useful way. One of such problems is related to the use of these data with small network bandwidth. This work presents an architecture based on Gis Services for the progressive transmission of vector maps in the Internet, anticipating the rasterization process in the server side, thus reducing the amount of data to be transmitted to the client. The architecture proposed uses all the advantages of Gis Services, that are becoming a standard in the construction of Gis applications based on services. 1. INTRODUCTION Visualization plays an important role for a better understanding of phenomena in several areas of knowledge and it is so with geographic data. Geographic maps are used long ago for viewing spatial data, helping us to better understand the relationships among those data. In the field of cartography, the visualization process must be formalized through the definition of rules and principles, once different kinds of data can be viewed in different ways [Cecconi 2003]. Such methods and techniques must be used as to optimize their use and validate the data consistency. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computational tools used either to make available and/or analyze information associated with position/localization over the Earth Surface. Currently, the Internet has become a huge content publishing media; being thus a favorable environment for the GIS users to exchange data, perform analyses and present geographic results. Geographic information in the Internet has rapidly evolved with the development of Web technologies. Internet creates a new geospatial data sharing environment, where data suppliers turn available their geographical databases in a way analogous to the Web pages’ textual information, allowing the users to use the Web for data transferring and utilize them for visualizing, analysis and/or manipulation [Bertolotto 1999]. This new configuration supplies new opportunities, for both, the public and the commercial domains, of using IX Brazilian Symposium on GeoInformatics, Campos do Jordão, Brazil, November 25-28, 2007, INPE, p. 97-108. 97