A Progressive Transmission Scheme for Vector Maps in Low-Bandwidth Environments Based on Device Rendering

The Internet has created an interesting environment for geospatial data sharing, so that users may transfer, visualize, manipulate and interact the data sets. This environment not only provides new opportunities to geospatial data usage, but also introduces new problems that should be addressed in order to provide an efficient and effective use of these datasets. One of such problems is related to the use of these spatial datasets in a low-bandwidth environment, such as those involving mobile computing. This paper presents a progressive transmission method for vector maps on the Web. The proposed method anticipates the map rasterization process to be performed at the server side, so that the amount of information transmitted may be reduced. We combine scale-dependent transmission techniques with simplification and progressive ones, in order to maximize the overall performance of a Web GIS environment.