The presentation consisted of a scenario of a disaster management application. In the presentation, those maps were served by different mapservers from different companies and were presented standalone or overlaid over each other in standard Web browsers. The demonstration was a big success and has already triggered more sponsors for the necessary funding. The final specifications are expected to be accepted in February 2000 and will then become public. Belgium Web mapping is the concept of displaying maps in a Web browser that are generated dynamically by a mapserver.
Geographic information is stored at the server side and displayed at the client side.
So the geographic information has to be transfered somehow from server to client. Both of these technologies have their advantages and disadvantages, and both have a different impact on network traffic. Bitmaps are displayed immediately but each time when the map changes, it must be regenerated at the server side and be transferred. If information is transferred in vector form, the client receives vectors and can generate a map from those vectors. If the user zooms into the map then a new map can be displayed immediately and without network traffic.