REVIEW OF CONSOLIDATED WEB MAPPING TECNOLOGIES FOR THE MANAGEMENT AND VISUALIZATION OF MULTIPLE GEOSPATIAL DATA LAYERS

In recent years, a significant advance in technology for the development of web-based applications and services is taking place. As a consequence, most desktop applications are evolving towards service based solutions that can be accessed remotely. The traditional GIS desktop applications are also evolving into web-based services partially thanks to the capabilities that web mapping technologies offer. This paper reviews the up-to-date web mapping technologies and research providing features, performance, data format compatibility and interoperability capabilities of them. Among all the existing web-mapping technologies, the proprietary Google Maps and arcGis Web Mapping as well as the open source solutions OpenLayers and Leaflet must be highlighted. In order to feature testing of highlighted open source technologies, a use case scenario for the visualization of weather prediction layers was implemented and tested.