The diagrams presented in this directory represent an early, high-level attempt to describe the spatial functionality of metacat. Though the overall concpets are similar, the implementation details are considerably different:

- Vector data is stored on the filesystem as shapefiles in order to avoid having a postgres/postgis dependency
- Geoserver acts as the map renderer and sends only images to the web client (not GML)
- The diagram does not accurately portray the spatial caching mechanism that is essentially the interface between geoserver and metacat.
- Complex spatial objects (ie GML features) can not currently be cached (only bounding coordinates)