Interfaces for geographics applications on the WWW: an adaptive computational hypermedia

The creation of interfaces in complex projects involving geographic data, heterogeneous and distributed, also on the Web, are usually based on a centralized server collecting the geographic data to be delivered to clients: they are remote searching systems, in which users type or select keys, to obtain results from the server. Possible computations cannot be usually performed by users. Our proposal is to develop Web-based interfaces to geographic applications and data by combining hypertext navigation with more conventional computation. The idea is to go beyond the current concept of hypermedia by offering a desktop in which users may both explore pieces of knowledge and apply computational tools, with the possibility of interact in more than one session. The hypermedia interface development has been performed on the basis of a design methodology in order to obtain an adaptive hypermedia environment to be offered to various types of intended users, for their special purposes, in rapidly evolving geographic scenarios.