The integration of the indexing, discovery and retrieval capabilities of Wide Area Information Servers with the navigation and presentation capabilities of World Wide Web provides a powerful and elegant solution to the provision of directory services to geographically-related data.
Not only environmental users will benefit from these facilities. There are many disciplines which also need to locate information based on its geographic location (for example tourist information).
Extensions to WWW clients to provide the ability to define a region of interest through a simple map interface would vastly improve the directory facilities.
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