What is Geospatial Mashups

This chapter examines current development in Web GIS with the implementation of geospatial mashup technologies, such as Google Map, in the context of map mashups and presents a classification of map Mashups and their application in tourism management and promotion. On the Web GIS context, mashup is the process of merging multiple sources of data, both spatial and non-spatial, into a single integrated spatial display. It is about extracting spatial data from a non-spatial source and combining with other spatial data and finally displaying it on a map. This chapter demonstrates that geospatial mashup has great potential to facilitate and widen the rapid development of the future web mapping technology in Web GIS in tourism development. It also highlights on the basic architecture and working principles of map mashups in the context of tourism management. The final section of this chapter emphasizes some issues and limitations inherent to the current mashup technologies like privacy protection, copyright issues, etc., which need to be worked out before its wider adoption.