Trends in Geographic Information System Technology

AS we enter the second decade of automated geographic information systems, important technology trends are emerging that will have a strong impact on how these systems are used and by whom. No longer are departmental systems hidden in the back room, accessible only to the technocrats. Today, cooperating organizations require an approach through which the system is accessible to a diverse blend of nontechnical users with differing applications. These multiparticipant groups also demand technology capable of managing the distribution of data to these numerous end users. To accommodate these requirements, six important trends have evolved: Continuous geographic coverage, spatial‐relational data‐base management, topological structures, distributed processing, content management, and open hardware and software architectures. This paper describes these trends and their impact on multiparticipant, multiapplication geographic information systems.