Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure and Geoprocessing Web—A Review of Commonalities and Differences of E-Science Approaches

Abstract

Online geoprocessing gains momentum through increased online data repositories, web service infrastructures, online modeling capabilities and the required online computational resources. Advantages of online geoprocessing include reuse of data and services, extended collaboration possibilities among scientists, and efficiency thanks to distributed computing facilities. In the field of Geographic Information Science (GIScience), two recent approaches exist that have the goal of supporting science in online environments: the geospatial cyberinfrastructure and the geoprocessing web. Due to its historical development, the geospatial cyberinfrastructure has strengths related to the technologies required for data storage and processing. The geoprocessing web focuses on providing components for model development and sharing. These components shall allow expert users to develop, execute and document geoprocessing workflows in online environments. Despite this difference in the emphasis of the two approaches, the objectives, concepts and technologies they use overlap. This paper provides a review of the definitions and representative implementations of the two approaches. The provided overview clarifies which aspects of e-Science are highlighted in approaches differentiated in the geographic information domain. The discussion of the two approaches leads to the conclusion that synergies in research on e-Science environments shall be extended. Full-fledged e-Science environments will require the integration of approaches with different strengths.

Distributed Geoscience Algorithm Integration Based on OWS Specifications: A Case Study of the Extraction of a River Network

“…Countries and organizations have conducted geospatial information service projects, such as the U.S. EarthCube program by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE), and China's TIANDITU. Geoscience services that are based on distributed information infrastructures have been developed in recent years, including Spatial Data and Information Infrastructure, e-Science, and Cyberinfrastructure [31][32][33][34]. The goal is to improve the access, sharing, visualization, and analysis of all forms of geoscience data and related resources.…”

Web Service for Positional Quality Assessment: The WPS Tier

“…Inside a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) environment, where the interoperability is a requirement, those processes would be encapsulated into a standardised way, like the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specification Web Processing Service (WPS) (Schut, 2007). However, some authors argue the focus of a SDI still remain in data providing instead of data processing (Hofer, 2013). Díaz et al (2012) argued that the integration of geoprocessing functionalities in a SDI environment is an open challenge.…”

“…Interoperability is one of the characteristics of the geoprocessing web, and the WPS specification plays this role. Hofer (2013) evaluated the commonalities and differences between geoprocessing web (Zhao et al, 2012) and geospatial cyberinfrasrtuctures (Yang et al, 2010). The author concluded that both concepts have the function of data analysis and knowledge generation, and also encompass the resource of distributed geoprocessing and web services.…”