Spatial analysis services in virtual geographic environment based on grid technologies

Abstract

In recent years, spatial data, including Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data and Remote Sensing (RS) images data, is becoming more and more tremendous, and their information also become more and more abundant. So it becomes a great challenge for current spatial information technologies to integrate all diverse and separated data resources and offer more convenient and intuitive geographic information services for complicated geographic problem solving. Virtual geographic environment (VGE) in conjunction with Grid technology can provide us the capability to solve these issues effectively. In this paper, we firstly introduce and analyze the major characteristics of VGE and Grid technologies. Based on Grid technology, we focus on how to build a virtual geographic environment that can integrate resources in high-efficiency and offer powerful geographic information services. The VGE aims to build more intuitive and efficient interactive visualization environments allowing distributed users to implement exploration of large amounts of complicated spatial information and to conduct geographic work. Then we design the VGE system architecture and its implementing mechanism is addressed. Meantime, some key technologies are also discussed. Finally, this paper designs a simple application service. The experiment result shows that the scheme addressed in the paper is efficient and feasible.