With the explosion of the World Wide Web, there's now a medium with the potential to distribute spatial technology benefits to all users of the world's digital information network. The burgeoning growth of Web-centered geospatial systems, services and information provides an unprecedented market opportunity for technology and service providers, and there have been notable successes. In a worst-case scenario, it will never catch up.
Web mapping can potentially provide much more.
GIS fulfils its potential when users can portray, overlay, compare and combine geodata from many different sources. Those sources will be Web servers, but they won't all be from a single vendor. Key specifications for the World Wide Spatial Web's technical interface standards are complete, but vendors, with a few exceptions, have yet to release OpenGIS-conformant client and server products, so interoperability is unavailable to users. Or consider the implications if telephone networks didn't talk to each other. This dismal vision describes the current state of the Spatial Web.