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Portals are called web sites which are designed to offer services and/or an outline of special subjects. They have been developed as fast as information data bases and electronic communication facilities were extended. Recently, portals with geographically referenced information became important and popular for different fields like geo information systems of cities (see e. or the presentation of economically relevant data in the context of regional marketing, foreign direct investment or tourism by indicating important objects like public institutions, companies, hotels, sights, etc. on maps. In this manner they may contribute to the improvement of industrial structure and the marketing of a region. For representing geographical data on maps, applications with special client-server-architecture have to be developed. There are different solutions for the Internet using HTML and JavaScript, Flash or Java Applets. In our contribution we discuss currently available solutions and show an alternative approach. Our solution is based on the Java Applet technology and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). This technology is part of the web solutions known as Web 2.0 which is strongly discussed and developed in the present. Our results are demonstrated as a user-friendly web application with data of the Slovakian region Špis (Zips). An extended version of this web solution could be nicely incorporated into a modern concept for tourism of the Špis region.
Web portals and many Internet solutions contain objects with a geographical reference such as the position of a company or a tourist attraction. Existing maps are protected by copyright. The licence fee is high and it is very expensive and complicated to create own maps. Freely useable and suitable maps for presentations, such as open source, do not exist – although the project OpenGeoDB is growing day after day. Recently, however some changes occurred. After a registration, Yahoo and Google offer interfaces to their map data for non-commercial users. This can be used for free. The interfaces offer advanced user possibilities for accessing maps, which are mostly high resolution ones, using the Web 2 methods. We show how to integrate Google´s API interface into one's own web applications and finally, how regional data, stored in a database, can be presented by this solution. Currently, Google does not have sufficiently detailed maps for Eastern Europe yet. Nevertheless, our web solution uses data of the region Zips (Špis) in Slovakia. It demonstrates how geo-based data can be used for supporting regional marketing concepts by Web 2 in the future.