if you are in a organisation where you store data with geographical information associated with it , then you have the option of sharing your data using the following standards specified by OGC:
One way to leverage these standards is to use the geoserver project for data storage and the openlayers project web for showing and editing maps.update 2009-09-03: When integrating with the extjs framework , then it is worth using the geoext project.
An example snippet from geoserver shows the use of WFS-T for inserting geometric data with associated metadata for an alley in Tasmania. I’ll just bring it here:
xmlns:wfs="http://www.opengis.net/wfs"
xmlns:topp="http://www.openplans.org/topp"
xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.opengis.net/wfs http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/1.0.0/WFS-transaction.xsd http://www.openplans.org/topp http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wfs/DescribeFeatureType?typename=topp:tasmania_roads">
494475.71056415,5433016.8189323 494982.70115662,5435041.95096618
alley
Note that oracle has a well supported ways of extracting GML from spatial datatypes if you need to construct the wfs transactions yourself ( oracle locator )
At the first glance wfs can seem a bit complicated. Luckily openlayers has nice wrappings for it that is easily accessed from code as shown in one of their examples running here :