Prototyping an open environment for sharing geographical analysis models on cloud computing platform

The sharing of geographical analysis models is of crucial importance for simulating geographic processes and phenomena in the current geographical information systems (e.g. Digital Earth), but there remain some issues that have not been completely resolved. The challenges include, eliminating model heterogeneity and searching for suitable infrastructures to support the open sharing and effective execution of models. Taking advantage of cloud computing, this article aims to address the above issues and develop an open environment for geographical analysis model sharing. On the basis of the analysis of the applicability of cloud computing, the architecture of the open environment is proposed. More importantly, key strategies designed for heterogeneous model description, model encapsulating as well as model deploying and transparent accessing in the cloud are discussed in detail to establish such an environment. Finally, the prototype environment is implemented, and experiments were conducted to verify the environment's feasibility to support the sharing of geographical analysis models.