The Flash player basically acts like a GIS software to display the base map. It reads coordinates and transforms them within the coordinate system of the user's screen. It can zoom in and follow mouse movements to move the base map. Each background polygon can be managed separately, for example by changing its colour according to the value of an indicator that is extracted on demand from the database. Univariate proportional symbols are drawn automatically on demand. Flash intersection operators allow objects located in a user-defined "buffer" to be selected automatically.

Géoclip draws its flexibilty from the separation of three elements: geographic data (coordinates), statistical data (texts and figures) and finally the interface (buttons, dialog boxes). Statistical data are very easily converted from the GIS to a database format that is widely used on Internet servers, such as mySql, Access, Sql-Server, etc. Geographic coordinates must be converted to a cartesian system. All GIS softwares perform this operation when displaying maps on screen, by projecting the spherical coordinates.