EVALUATING POTENTIAL FREE SOFTWARE FOR WEB-BASED MULTIMEDIA CARTOGRAPHY

Abstract. Most universities students depend on the use of proprietary software as it has prominent capabilities to meet their needs. Although the proprietary software such as Adobe Flash Professional has a high capability to create a web-based multimedia system, budget constraints become the main reason why free software will be used as an alternative to proprietary software. This study is carried out to evaluate the potential free software for developing a web-based multimedia in cartography projects specifically for students in developing countries. Wix and Weebly are the two software that has been potentially explored among the ten selected software in the market. The current commercial software (Adobe Flash Professional) was also applied as a benchmark to the selected free software. This three software were individually utilised to design and develop a web-based multimedia of e-sport system and their technical capabilities were comparatively assessed according to elements of a common multimedia, website and other mapping assessment aspects. The finding showed that each of the software has unique characteristics and has successfully generated the end products according to the standard web-based multimedia title. Although these free software could produce a better looking, more flexible and time saving mapping platform than the end product created from the Adobe Flash Professional, they have limitation in creating menu function. This exploratory and cases study has also demonstrated that the alternative free software has potentials to replace the current proprietary software, while Wix is the best among the two selected software.