# Review of Web Mapping: Eras, Trends and Directions
## 2 Background and Developments
### What Is Web Mapping? Before introducing web mapping, we can identify some of the currently available definitions:  
\"Web mapping is... : (1) information and data updating, (2) security and authentication of the user, (3) collection of user-filled forms (surveys, opinion polls etc.) and (4) access to databases.\" [5];  
\"Web mapping is the process of designing, implementing, generating and delivering maps on the World Wide Web.\" [6];  
\"Web mapping is the technique of utilizing maps that are obtained by an information system for spatial and geographical data.\" [7]; and  
\"Web mapping is the process of using maps delivered by geographical information systems (GIS).\" [8]. Apart from the acknowledged scientific and technical definitions, we decided to also consider what is provided by Wikipedia for two reasons: it is a user-contributed definition which can be improved and enriched by everybody and it is one of the main sources of information for many people, sometimes scholars included. We will see that, in fact, these definitions are reductive and, to have an exhaustive definition, the term web mapping needs to be put into context with the specific period it refers to. Three basic elements are implied in web mapping: geodata/geoinformation and their visualization (maps), geospatial software and the World Wide Web, or the Web (web hereafter). Depending on the emphasis put on maps or on the technology and the processing of geodata to produce maps, people tend to consider the concept of web mapping as different from that of Web GIS (even if they admit that the boundary is blurry) or, on the other hand, they use the two termsas synonyms. For the sake of clarity, we chose to define Web GIS as a fully-fledged GIS that takes advantage of web technology for communicating among its components (data, functionality, and interface). The concept of web mapping is more general and focuses on providing and supporting mapping functions at different levels of complexity, for applications and users. There are more terms, which are sometimes confused with web mapping and Web GIS. These include Internet GIS, GeoWeb (or Geospatial Web) and Distributed GIS. Internet GIS [9] is a term often used synonymously with Web GIS. It is an Internet geospatial application that can use more services than only the web. Therefore, it is broader with respect to the applied technology but not as pervasive in usage as the term Web GIS. In reality, the web is the most commonly used Internet technology and Web GIS is the most common form of online GIS [10]. Hence we will use the term Web GIS to represent all online GIS. For GeoWeb, one can find two different definitions: the former is about the merging of geospatial information with non-geospatial ones (photos, videos, news, etc.) [11]; the latter is as synonym of Distributed GIS, i.e., a widespread geospatial environment allowing the sharing of interoperable components. Even if people have been using the same name, web mapping, the concept and practice of web mapping has dramatically changed over time, following the evolution of the interaction among the mapping data/information, the Internet, the web, the available tools and the citizens/users' attitudes [12]. If we want to summarize, we can say that web mapping consists of a website with mapping capability. The capability has grown in time and the interest of people in consuming (and more recently in contributing to) those websites has grown accordingly. If we add the names of the eras, as they are proposed in this paper, we are better able to identify the characteristics of the specific type of web mapping we are referring to. For example, the beginning of web mapping was the equivalent of publishing static maps on the Internet, hence \"static web mapping\". With \"intelligent web mapping\", we mean the last frontier of web mapping, where context plays the fundamental role in the interaction between mapping/geographic information and users.