Abstract
The use of geographic information systems (GISs) has become popular in many sectors, including agriculture. A GIS requires map data, which need to be purchased in most cases. In 2008, the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan began to publish fundamental geospatial data (FGD) on the Internet. The data are free to use, but not easy to use, because users must extract the area they need and convert the data to their own GIS format. To resolve this problem, we developed a service to map areas requested by users from the FGD (1 : 25,000). This service accepts requests from desktop GISs via the Internet and returns images based on the Web Map Service protocol. Because most GISs can work as Web Map Service clients, many GIS users can now download maps of Japan without having to extract or convert the FGD. In addition, under some conditions, Web applications using this service can publish maps without seeking permission from the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan. The images provided by the service are suitable as simple background layers because the service does not use the more detailed 1 : 2,500 FGD.
