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The Geo spatial cloud System approach Offers lower initial investment, on going Maintenance , software licenses expenditure and resources. Geo Spatial Data
GIS : geographic Information System A GIS system is that captures, stores,analyzes, manages and presents data linked to a location.
( Wikipedia )
Due to cost & complexity of having Geo spatial data ( GIS data ) by enterprise , the decision making based on GIS is seldom carried out . For example a provision distribution company most of time does not have its own GIS data to do route analysis. But after Google &Bing , some of these enterprises are at least using it for geocoding of spatial or map data. More and more Geo spatial data service providers embrace cloud technology , it would become easier for many enterprise to base some of their decision on Geographic facts . Geo spatial Cloud Architecture The geo spatial cloud architecture is not very different from any other architecture except in terms of data base and its operation. A simplified view of the architecture is shown below. The user interface could SOAP / XML based web access. The data security component depends on the type of data held .
User Interface
Application
Virtual abstraction/Processing clusters
Management
STORAGECLUSTE R
A detail geospatial cloud would contain the data inputs in various formats including Point data and a modeling component , spatial data base and a storage management. The visualization application could be at the end user location where the processed from cloud is used to visualizeit . Geo spatial cloud for Enterprise ( community clouds) A major use of this cost effective technology would be to have a Spatial cloud set up by a community of same users such as Infrastructure Developers , Terrain analysts. This type of cloud where data is not very sensitive could be built around service providers such as Amazon or can be built by the consortium. A representative architecture is shown below. All the nodes are physical machines supporting number of Virtual machines . some of the nodes would be used for computations where as some of the nodes would be used for cluster management , resource management other network related functions.
USER
Router& switches
Load Balancer
Cluster controller
Backup manager
Cluster controller
Node
Resource &config Manager
Node
Node
Node
Applications ( Modeling , Data base etc) Nodes : Physical hardware on which Virtual application abstraction runs( Representative architecture). The same architecture scaled up with a dedicated spatial data base management which can handle large data sets and storage could be used as Geo spatial cloud Data storage system and research and data dissemination.
E Governance : Geo spatial data Cloud The Geographic data and its spatial attributes plays important role in E governance as well in Disaster management.The land parcel its owner ship as wellas type i.e. farm land or barren land information isan important information for crop production forecasting and land revenue collections. The cloud architecture for such process would be a cost effective solution. In this concept , a small scale cloud ( mini Cloud ) with localized database copy could be fielded at each district ( zone) area. Allthese mini clouds should be connected with a main cloud which would hold the central spatial data base. The back of mini cloud data will be kept at central cloud. The central cloud would also be able to hold disaster or natural calamity prone area data for speedy recovery from any calamities. The cloud having a resilience in providing on demand computefacility , would help in disaster models and loss thereof to be computed easily e.g. catastrophe model which compute & data intensive. Some of the major benefits which can be reaped from Cloud based solutions are :- ( either hosted by a service provider or provisioned ) are :
Map Views creations faster and affordable . example : Google Maps . Data Storage, Archiving, Disaster Recovery. Flexible design and resource Planning . SaaS functions easily possible to prevent more application available to large users
Present State of Spatial Cloud Computing Several companies are operating spatial cloud in one form or another such as Cloudgone , Google ,, ( Earth Builder, Maps and Fusion charts)Some service providers are mainly providing data services , data storage and some are research geo spatial cloud . Google were the first to open up this domain .now companies like GIScloud.com , spatial stream.com are more towards traditional GIS solution providing GIs data analysis.ESRIs ArcGIS.com does provide web based map services and data .ESRI & amazon EC2 collaboration helps users in US to deploy geo data base images on Amazon cloud . Conclusion Cloud computing paradigm is best suited for Geo spatial storage and analysis .The Geo spatial data being voluminous and multivariate , requires compute intensive solutions for inference which cloud flexible provisioning system easily makes it happen.
About author : The author has 28 years plus experience in Digital Signal processing ( Image & Pattern Recognition) , Large secure networks design & fielding , and Network security. For last3 years actively involved in secure cloud computing design and algorithms.