Progressive and autonomous approach towards the generation of personalized web maps

The web is one of the most important mean of disseminating maps to users worldwide. These maps are commonly generated, on-the-fly, by extracting and displaying pre-processed data which is stored beforehand in specific databases. Though rapid, this approach lacks flexibility and does not necessarily provide the user with all the relevant spatial data at the right time and in the right way. Indeed, it may burden the user's screen with useless data while marginalizing some objects or landmarks which are explicitly requested by the user. In order to provide the user with personalized web map services, we propose to progressively generate, transmit, and display spatial objects according to the decreasing order of their importance for the user. The approach is based upon the use of software agents which compete for the occupation of the limited space of the user' screen. As illustration, we apply our approach to the context of on-the-fly tourist web mapping scenario.