A Cloud-Enabled Collaborative Hub for Analysis of Geospatial Big Data

Abstract

Geospatial big data are analyzed for addressing a specific research or management problem on global scale, and science gateways or Hub, have been widely adopted in recent years as an effective platform for an entry to computational resources, research collaboration, dissemination of data, applications and publications, and community engagement. However, replicating deployment and setup is a non-trivial task. Cloud computing provides an attractive alternative, simplifying resource provision and enabling reliable and scalable replication. This paper describes ongoing efforts to a cloud-enabled Geospatial Hub hosting general-purpose software building blocks, which provides geospatial data access, processing, analysis, and visualization capabilities. The technologies underlying these components, the automation of deployment and configuration on cloud with the Elastic Compute Service (ECS) and Object Storage Service (OBS) are described. This work builds geospatial big data analysis capabilities into web-based Hub platform and empower it by cloud computing. This will open a way for easy development of a variety of online tools for probing and presenting geospatial big data and digital information.