It was very successful again this year. There were some 150 attendees and 50 papers presented. This demonstrates the relevance and interest in the geo-spatial Web technology area. This is now operational at 18 provider sites in Canada and implemented on UNIX, NT servers. Clive Best presented the CEO version HGS which differs from SS by having an extra directory level layer to locate HGS servers.
Discussions are underway to unify the search and retrieval part of the protocol.
Thereafter software and interface scripts will be available to all partners. Yonsook remarked that the JAVA virtual machine was being implemented n different platforms outside of the browser. Thereby it can exploit OS specific features. She wondered now what that really will mean for portability issues. The JRC have been studying VRML and multi-user VRML for the European Community.