Because DGI is a product of the internet, it is inherently young and still in its development stage. Many of the application that are offered on the web are prototypes, often using unproven technology. It is only within the last five years that the internet has become popular and companies and government agencies have begun to see the benefits of linking to the web.
GIS by itself was spawned from military cartographic programs in the United States designed to give military decision makers a better knowledge of their terrain than their enemy. The internet as well, is a product of the military's need to share electronic knowledge across long distances. This historical revelation will cover the years in which the internet contributed to the distribution of geographic information and will not examine the history of GIS itself.
As the internet gained popularity in 1993 some corporations saw the internet as an excellent way to distribute maps to the public. The first DGI application available on the internet was Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center's Map Server. This was a simple map viewing program which made use of government released data. It has limited interactive capabilities with which users could browse the various map. Map Server had no GIS capabilities. Within months of Xerox's program, several other web servers in countries all over the world were producing online maps of their countries.
Perhaps the most significant development in DGI was the conception of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) (www.fgdc.gov). NSDI was an American initiative which tackled all aspects of DGI including; training programs, standards development, project grants, federal mandates and a series of networks designed to help the coordination of data production and retrieval. US agencies with data having anything to do spatial representation posted their information on the web.
Smaller, academic projects also began appearing such as the Digital Libraries Initiative (http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu) whose goal it was to create on online library of one million geographic information holdings.
1996 was the "breaking out" year for the internet as everyone seemed to be online and the internet became a part of everyday life. With the usefulness of online information becoming evident, all major GIS corporations introduced their internet mandates for the future. This included the large commercial GIS giants such as ESRI, MapInfo, Intergraph and others. Online GIS meant that users could use the server's GIS software through their internet connection rather than just downloading the raw data and inserting it into their own program. Not only did this offer convenient and economic advantage to the GIS user, but also benefited the company by introducing the basics of their programs to the public in hopes that they might purchase the complete version.
Perhaps the most successful of these online GIS companies is GRASSlinks (http://regis.berkeley.edu/grasslinks). This program was designed by the university of Berkeley and deals mainly with data from San Francisco and its surrounding areas. GRASSlinks incorporates a custom-built DGI program which links the university's server with a running GIS program. The program used is GRASS which was developed by the US Army corps of engineers. Because GRASS has analytical capabilities it could do much more online than just create maps. This was a revolutionary advancement because it allowed users to perform GIS functions without the need for GIS software.
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