Description of Maplet Maplet is an application which enables the Web service to use geographical information for its own purposes. Therefore, the Web service can offer services and products that are related to the location information on a map, the Web service can present its supply on a map and enables advanced geographical searches. Maplet is a search engine that is independent on platforms and terminals. It can easily be connected to different map servers and the search engine can be used on PCs and wireless terminals as well. Maplet offers a map-based search engine to be solid part of Web service. Presenting the contents of a Web service on a map is a natural way of presenting the supply to the user. By making a selection on a map and defining the search criteria, the user can easily find the right information from the service. During the search, the corresponding locations and item counts are shown on a map. Therefore, the Maplet application gives a lot of information about the products already during the search. The user of the service no longer needs to make a search that will give no result or too much information at one time. Maplet tells the user at which products it’s worth taking a closer look. Maplet is based on a modern multi-tier architecture, which enables work load to be devided on various components, and thus makes the solution very flexible. The application has clear interfaces to make connections between different map servers and Web services. The user interface can be defined by using XML, which makes the definition of the layout for different terminals and user groups very quick. The contents of information of the search engine are defined with parameters. Because of its architecture, Maplet also suits well for use on small terminals and in slow network connections. Maps are requested only once from the map server when the user makes a selection on a map. Defining the other search criteria, Maplet brings property and location information from a Web service on a map through the efficient cache memory solution. In addition, the data is compressed for the transmission. Thus size of data to be transferred has become very small. Maplet works well for irregular users, because either Maplet or the material are not needed to be installed on a terminal, instead Maplet starts up automatically from a Web page. Maplet’s user interface has been implemented with Java programming language; therefore, free cropping of a map and zooming options have been made possible and, in addition, the item counts will change in real time when the search criteria changes. It is also possible to use slide bars in defining the search criteria so that the item count is updated in real time when the search criteria is changed by moving a slide bar. Based on Java 1.1 version, Maplet works in the most commonly used browsers without any utility program.