Developing a grid-enabled spatial Web portal for Internet GIServices and geospatial cyberinfrastructure

Geospatial cyberinfrastructure integrates distributed geographic information processing (DGIP) technology, high-performance computing resources, interoperable Web services, and sharable geographic knowledge to facilitate the advancement of geographic information science (GIScience) research, geospatial technology, and geographic education. This article addresses three major development issues of geospatial cyberinfrastructure: the performance of grid-enabled DGIP services, the integration of Internet GIService resources, and the technical challenges of spatial Web portal implementation. A four-tier grid-enabled Internet GIService framework was designed for geospatial cyberinfrastructure. The advantages of the grid-enabled framework were demonstrated by a spatial Web portal. The spatial Web portal was implemented based on current available Internet technologies and utilizes multiple computing resources and high-performance systems, including local PC clusters and the TeraGrid. By comparing their performance testing results, we found that grid computing (TeraGrid) is more powerful and flexible than local PC clusters. However, job queuing time and relatively poor performance of cross-site computation are the major obstacles of grid computing for geospatial cyberinfrastructure. Detailed analysis of different computational settings and performance testing contributes to a deeper understanding of the improvements of DGIP services and geospatial cyberinfrastructure. This research demonstrates that resource/service integration and performance improvement can be accomplished by deploying the new four-tier grid-enabled Internet GIService framework. This article also identifies four research priorities for developing geospatial cyberinfrastructure: the design of GIS middleware, high-performance geovisualization methods, semantic GIService, and the integration of multiple GIS grid applications.