An open source general purpose framework for implementing WebGIS applications.

In the last years the increasing needs of geographical information for environmental analysis and monitoring purposes have encouraged the development of web-oriented GIS architectures. In this paper we present the implementation of a general purpose framework devoted to support the research activities through WebGIS applications finalized to share results with scientific community, decision-makers and/or other stakeholders. The architecture proposed as well as the user interface have been implemented using open source tools in order to guarantee the web application sustainability and the implementation of customized geospatial functions required by research projects. The framework is composed by a WebGIS application (WGViewer) developed using PHP/Ajax technologies and based on KaMap (0.2) project. The GUI with analysis and querying functions are completely customizable using a system database through which the application is able to work with many different profiles and datasets. The PHP application is able to access and manage spatial data through MapServer library and its php_mapscript wrapper. The framework can manage different projects at the same time and can access to specific Geo Databases; datasets can be composed by georeferenced files or stored into a PostgreSQL/PostGIS DBMS. The main services include a WMS and a metadata catalogue, a J2EE application based on GeoNetwork project. The Kyoto Observatory geoportal of Tuscany Regional Government is one of scientific projects where this framework has been used in order to store, visualize and integrate datasets of CO2 carbon balance at different spatial and time scales. This web application has been developed to monitor the response of ecosystems to the inter-annual climate variations implementing specific queries and grid-based extraction functions.