Design parameters for an interactive web mapping system

Web mapping has in recent decades become a useful way of presenting and extracting information for multiple users. Because of its confined display environment, web map information has to be carefully designed to fit into different pages so that the graphics and information to be displayed will not be too dense. In addition, when incorporating with spatial analysis functionality, a selection of client-side or server-side Internet Mapping Systems has to be made to balance performance and functionality. All these issues will be examined in an application of a web map system. The development of a multi-modal public transport query system illustrates how seamless maps of varying scales are designed and synchronized with each other, how dense information in a bilingual base map and transport data are arranged into suitable pages or hierarchies, and how efficiency in retrieving relevant map pages on the web might be achieved.