Building GIS web services on JXTA network

In recent years, Web services and Peer-to-Peer (or simply P2P) appear as two of the hottest research topics in network computing. On the one hand, by adopting a decentralized, network-based style, P2P technologies can make P2P systems enhance overall reliability and fault-tolerance, increase autonomy, and enable ad-hoc communication and collaboration. On the other hand, Web services provides a good approach to integrate various heterogeneous systems and applications into a cooperative environment. This paper presents the techniques of combining Web services and P2P technologies into GIS to construct a new generation of GIS, which is more flexible and cooperative. As a case study, an ongoing project JGWS is introduced which is an experimental GIS Web services platform built on JXTA. This paper also explores the schemes of building GIS Web services in a P2P environment.