Science gateways are a key driver of the democratization of access to computing and data resources in science and engineering research. Science gateway technology has evolved in tandem with modern web technologies and adopts several standard design principles that have accelerated their development. The evolution of science gateways and their most common components are discussed, followed by some examples of popular gateways adopted by the GIS community. The challenges faced by modern gateways in response to user needs and evolving technologies are presented to drive further discussion and development.
Geospatial Web Services make geospatial information available as part of the World Wide Web. Much of the geographic information on the Web are documents that require significant processing to be used as geospatial products like maps and features. Geospatial Web Services exposes services of a GIS platform to the Web. To achieve this the standards that underlie the WWW - http, html, etc. - were extended with geospatial technologies. The Web Map Service - standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 - marked a milestone in the development and deployment of geospatial web services. WMS along with additional standards now provide access to millions of geospatial data and services on the Web. As of 2024, over 3.5 million spatial datasets were available on the internet served by over 400,000 operational services using OGC standards.
GIS APIs are collections of library modules that resemble various functionalities of GIS software through programming. GIS APIs evolved from desktop GIS. GIS APIs, as a distributed solution, are interoperable, scalable, light-weight, user-friendly, and versatile to a wide range of GIS users. This entry provides an overview of common GIS APIs, their functionalities as well as other related APIs. The general procedure to develop customized GIS applications is briefly discussed and demonstrated in a case study.