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STUTTGART

TECHNIK

Introduction 

        STUTTGART UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED 

SCIENCES 

1  Introduction   

1.1  Backgroud 

In the nineties, Web maps and digital maps became popular due to the success of the 

Personal  Computers  and  the  Internet.  These  mapping  technologies  allow 

personalization  and  adaptation,  are  easily  deliverable,  revised  in  shorter  times,  can 

incorporate multimedia, and may be interactive. Now the popularity of mobile devices 

such as PDA s, mobile phones etc. and the availability of development environments 

such as J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) for such devices have  made possible to design 

and develop of  new kind of cartographic client software. No doubt that in the  future 

cartographic data is not PC centric but would be available on mobile systems. 

But  the  map  display  on  a  handheld  device  is  a  challenge  to  cartography  due  to  the 

limiting factors such as screen size, colors, resolution, processing power, memory and 

power  supply.  And  people  will  demand  more  advanced  reliable  applications.  J2ME 

was born to help solving such problems. In this Java based development environment, 

the  Connected  Limited  Device  Configuration  (CLDC)  and  the  Mobile  Information 

Device Profile (MIDP) are specifically designed for the wireless devices.   

In  the  earlier  years,  the  Web  Map  Service  (WMS)  mostly  based  on  raster  image 

format.  Due  to  big  size  and  limited  bandwidth,  the  raster  image  format  is  also  one 

obstacle  to  the  data  transforming  from  PC  to  mobile  device.  But  after  the  birth  of 

vector image  format, every thing  has changed. The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 

is an open standard for encoding geographic information in a XML language defined 

by W3C and it becomes one part of WMS recommendations. As one subset of SVG, 

Scalable  Vector  Graphics  Tiny  (SVGT)  is  not  related  to  any  specific  hardware  or 

software  platform:  data  encoded  using  it  can  be  easily  read  and  understood  by  any 

programming  language  and  software  system  able  to  parse  XML  streams.  SVGT 

encodes  vector  geographical  information  together  with  metadata  on  spatial  and 

non spatial resources. 

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