The University Map Project aims to give schools a way to map their campuses. The term centrally distributed works here, because the universities will be able to reference each other. The primary technologies used are XML, Google Maps, and Javascript.
AJAX JDBC ResultSet in Javascript. Uses XMLHTTP to send xml server data to a web browser HTML form with no refresh, reload or submit (like Google Suggest). Data can be SQL, object relational map (like Hibernate), XML, other mapping (like SOAP)