摘要：Most popular applications currently running on the Internet, the World Wide Web is of an exponential growth in size, which results in network congestion and server overloading. In this paper, we analyze the characteristics of SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and the state-of-art techniques, which have been used in WebGIS. Then, the basic characteristics of DM3 database system were introduced; Furthermore, a novel N-tier WebGIS architecture based on SOAP and the framework supported both server-based and client\|based solutions are proposed. Finally, some experiments and implementations are shown.