Information Brokers for a Web-Based Geographic Information System

This chapter presents a prototype system which allows the geographic information user to locate data efficiently. By adapting ideas from business systems research (particularly from the field of multi-agent systems), a distributed network of information brokers has been designed. These information brokers understand geographic metadata and use it to communicate with the user through a graphical user interface (GUI). This approach removes many of the disadvantages of general Web search engines (which have no understanding of metadata). Furthermore, it allows specialised information brokers to be created, which can be situated in the best part of the Internet for their user community. This overcomes a major problem with current geographic metadata servers, where a server in America becomes unusable from Europe at most times of the European working day.