Distributed geospatial information service

Abstract

Since its inception in the 1960s, Geospatial/Geographic Information System (GIS) has evolved rapidly and has become part of main stream Information Technology (IT). The projected market size is predicted to grow to $30 billion by 2005 (Gewin 2004). One of the main reasons for this fast-paced development is that GIS continually benefits from the advancement of computing technologies (Tomlinson 1998). The birth of computer networks in the 1970s, in conjunction with the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, has broadened the way people share geospatial data and computing resources. In the computing and geospatial communities, several important observations/ issues are evident: 1) Use of Computing resources. It is generally the case that computing capacity is very much under-utilized. According to an IBM survey (Conry-Murray 2004), only 6%, 60% and 20% of CPU power of desktops, mainframes and workstations, respectively, are utilized. Collectively this represents an immense, untapped pool of computing power. 2) Compatibility of geospatial data. Geospatial data are highly heterogeneous as they have typically been collected using different techniques, in different formats, and with different resolutions, projections, coordinate systems, etc. (Goodchild et al. 1999; Vckovski 1998). This heterogeneity has limited the degree to which data can be shared and merged seamlessly and transparently. 3) Legacy systems. To date there are many legacy systems that were developed in the absence of system and application standards. The resulting lack of interoperability among these legacy systems is a growing concern in the geospatial user community (Tao 2001). 4) Reliability and scalability. With potentially more and more users concurrently accessing centralized geospatial repositories, reliability and scalability of the centralized repository approach is becoming increasingly difficult. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.