Architecture and key technologies of grid geographic information system

The highly efficient and stable collaborative computation platform for geospatial information can be constructed on the basis of Grid computing technology, combined with Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing technology and geospatial database technology. This paper proposed the architecture and key technologies of the Grid GIS (Geographic Information System) incorporated with P2P structure, and correspondingly a Grid GIS prototype named Nebula was designed and then implemented. Nebula is a suite of middleware for geospatial Grid computing, which could be deployed onto various service nodes in network. Based on Grid protocols and infrastructure, Nebula provides invocation interfaces to users in form of Grid services. By using P2P message based communication mechanism, complex geospatial computation tasks could be accomplished by Nebula in a collaborative way. This paper introduced Nebula's architecture and key modules, and according to experimental data, we discussed the Grid GIS's advantages, application scenarios and future directions.