Rola serwisów WMS WFS i generalizacji w upowszechnianiu informacji geograficznej

Geographic information systems (GIS) have over 40 years of history. Their applications range from global environmental monitoring to geomarketing. The Internet brought about a sudden growth of the information society. Upon a close examination of the development of the architecture of GIS systems we can observe that since the end of the 1990s GIS have a distributed architecture of 3 and n-layers. The term GIS is systematically replaced by SDI (Spatial Data Infrastructure). It may be expected that within the next 5 to 10 years the most frequently used GIS programs will be the Internet browsers. Further in the paper the author describes spatial data services: WMS, WFS, and metadata, as well as the role of generalization in the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure.