Patent ID: 7236173

Claim:
A system for accessing geographic information comprising: (a) two or more geographically distributed servers; (b) a thin client; (c) a servlet executing on one of the servers, wherein the servlet is implemented by a single code stream for use on multiple platforms, the servlet configured to: (i) obtain geographically distributed map data from the two or more servers wherein the map data comprises metadata in a form of layer definitions for vector based map layer data; (ii) obtain geographically distributed attribute data from the two or more servers; (iii) declutter the map and attribute data; (iv) compact and encode the map and attribute data; (v) place the compacted and encoded map and attribute data over a network in a location accessible to the thin client; (d) an application on the thin client, the application configured to: (i) obtain the compacted and encoded map and attribute data from the location over the network; (ii) display the compacted and encoded map and attribute data on the thin client.