With fixed periods forest resources inventories and wide application of remote sensing,GPS technologies in forestry, large amount of spatial forest data have been collected in various forest resources bureaus. It is an urgent task to fully use these valuable spatial data to serve the national economic development and ecological construction. The expensive commercial geospatial software constrained small and middle-size companies to publish their spatial forest data. Fast development of open source software in the last decades provides an alternative solution to the commercial software. In the paper we developed a WebGIS based spatial forest information sharing system on county level with open source software FireFox, Apache Http Server, UMN MapServer and PostGIS/PostgreSQL. The system adopted four-tier architecture: client, Web server, application server and database server. The users can render the overlay information of spatial forest data layers, execute zooming in, zooming out, panning, and information querying functions. The system can provide most functions that commercial WebGIS has. It is suitable for small and middle-size companies which have limited budgets for developing WebGIS based spatial information sharing system to publish and share spatial information.
For technical and other reasons there is a dilemma that data providers cannot find an appropriate way to redistribute spatial forest data and data users who need spatial data cannot access and integrate available forest resources information. To overcome this dilemma, this paper proposed a spatial forest information system based on Web service using an open source software approach. With Web service based architecture, the system can enable interoperability, integrate Web services from other application servers, reuse codes, and shorten the development time and cost. At the same time, it is possible to extend the local system to a regional or national spatial forest information system. The growth of Open Source Software （OSS） provides an alternative choice to proprietary software for operating systems, web servers, Web-based GIS applications and database management systems. Using open source software to develop spatial forest information systems can greatly reduce the cost while providing high performance and sharing spatial forest information. We chose open source software to build a prototype system for Xixia County, Henan Province, China. By integrating OSS packages Deegree and UMN MapServer which are compliant to the OGC open specifications, the prototype system enables users to access spatial forest information and travelling information of Xixia County which come from two different data servers via a standard Web browser and promotes spatial forest information sharing.
