A method, system, and article of manufacture provide for an interactive geographic information system on a thin client. Geographic information may be viewed and interacted with on the thin client. The information is available while the thin client is connected or disconnected to/from a network. The thin client has functionality commonly available in a standard client including raster maps for multiple zoom levels of multiple tiles, raster zooms, selectable vector geometry, geo-referencing information for map navigation, metadata in the form of layer definitions, links to object attributes in databases, links to object reports generated by corporate web servers, uploadable, sharable redlining data, offline access, and a compact database.