GeoSquare: collaborative geoprocessing models’ building, execution and sharing on Azure Cloud

Abstract

Collaborative geoprocessing models have become one of the major solutions to significantly enhance the capacity to derive knowledge over a network, which are critical for the support of comprehensive analyses in a virtual geographic environment (VGE). With the emergence and growing maturity of the cloud computing infrastructure, a cloud-based platform for collaborative geoprocessing models promises to provide a pattern for the next generation of geoprocessing collaboration in the GIS realm. However, the problems with the existing collaborative geoprocessing models remain numerous, including the following: heterogeneity in description specifications hinders different geoprocessing services in collaborative work; the heterogeneity in messages mechanisms makes the cooperation among the geoprocessing services difficult and an integrated geoprocessing model framework centring on the collaborative model's lifecycle is absent. To address these problems, this article proposes a cloud-based framework for building, executing and sharing collaborative models called GeoSquare: (1) a lifecycle model was designed for convenient and flexible collaborative geoprocessing; (2) a collaboration mechanism was implemented to solve specification heterogeneity; (3) a collaboration method and its proxy were used to resolve the heterogeneity in message communication and (4) to acquire better scalability, some elastic cloud features were utilized in the framework. A GeoSquare prototype was implemented on the Microsoft Azure Cloud to demonstrate the applicability and availability. Results show that users can build, execute, publish and share collaborative geoprocessing models with high efficiency in GeoSquare. GeoSquare provides a novel collaborative geoprocessing pattern enabling further geographic research in a cloud infrastructure.

Content-Based Discovery for Web Map Service using Support Vector Machine and User Relevance Feedback

“…It is implemented upon our previous system, GeoSquare, a collaborative online sharing and geoprocessing platform [21,22]. The JavaScript library Heatmap.js was used to implement the user feedback collection mechanism.…”

Geospatial Information Processing Technologies

“…The wide adoption of the enabling technologies such as web services, SOA and cloud computing make such a distributed geospatial collaboration network possible but there are also challenges. One of the major challenges is how to guarantee the reliability of geoprocessing in a mutable DCE (Gong et al 2012;Wu et al 2015). Traditionally, geoprocessing is conducted on a single machine with a stand-alone GISystem toolkit installed.…”

“…A flood analysis model was developed to analyze flooding in the Boyang Lake area using remote sensing data before a flood, during flooding and after flooding. By developing web-based human-computer interaction interfaces using Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies, workflow models involving human participation have also been developed in GeoSquare for educational and research purposes (Wu et al 2015;Yang et al 2016), including remote sensing image geometrical rectification and classification. Through integration with NASA world wind, GeoJModelBuilder (Jiang et al 2017) also provides many hydrological models such as for water turbidity, watershed runoff, and drainage extraction.…”

Global-Scale Resource Survey and Performance Monitoring of Public OGC Web Map Services

“…(3) Evolution of service standard: this investigation can help researchers and standard makers from both industry and academia review the development and adoption of open service standards for a geospatial data portrayal. By linking cutting-edge web visualization technologies in relation to the prevailing interoperation modes (e.g., crowdsourcing [5,6] and collaboration [7,8]), we can rethink the appropriateness of the WMS standard, thus inspiring us to conceive new directions for advancement.…”