The framework of a geospatial semantic web-based spatial decision support system for Digital Earth

Abstract

While significant progress has been made to implement the Digital Earth vision, current implementation only makes it easy to integrate and share spatial data from distributed sources and has limited capabilities to integrate data and models for simulating social and physical processes. To achieve effectiveness of decision-making using Digital Earth for understanding the Earth and its systems, new infrastructures that provide capabilities of computational simulation are needed. This paper proposed a framework of geospatial semantic web-based interoperable spatial decision support systems (SDSSs) to expand capabilities of the currently implemented infrastructure of Digital Earth. Main technologies applied in the framework such as heterogeneous ontology integration, ontology-based catalog service, and web service composition were introduced. We proposed a partition-refinement algorithm for ontology matching and integration, and an algorithm for web service discovery and composition. The proposed interoperable SDSS enables decision-makers to reuse and integrate geospatial data and geoprocessing resources from heterogeneous sources across the Internet. Based on the proposed framework, a prototype to assist in protective boundary delimitation for Lunan Stone Forest conservation was implemented to demonstrate how ontology-based web services and the services-oriented architecture can contribute to the development of interoperable SDSSs in support of Digital Earth for decision-making.     

FedIDS: a federated cloud storage architecture and satellite image delivery service for building dependable geospatial platforms

Earth observation satellites produce large amounts of images/data that not only must be processed and preserved in reliable geospatial platforms but also efficiently disseminated among partners/researchers for creating derivative products through collaborative workflows. Organizations can face up this challenge in a cost-effective manner by using cloud services. However, outages and violations of integrity/confidentiality associated to this technology could arise. This article presents FedIDS, a suite of cloud-based components for building dependable geospatial platforms. The Fed component enables organizations to build shared geospatial data infrastructure through federation of independent cloud resources to withstand outages, whereas IDS avoids violations of integrity/confidentiality of images/data in sharing information and collaboration workflows. A FedIDS prototype, deployed in Spain and Mexico, was evaluated through a study case based on a satellite imagery captured by a Mexican antenna and another based on a satellite imagery of a European observation mission. The acquisition, storage and sharing of images among users of the federation, the exchange of images between Mexican and Spanish sites and outage scenarios were evaluated. The evaluation revealed the feasibility, reliability and efficiency of FedIDS, in comparison with available solutions, in terms of performance, storage consume and integrity/confidentiality when sharing images/data in collaborative scenarios.     

Fundamental aspects of access control for geospatial data

Abstract

In recent years, geographical information systems have been employed in a wide variety of application domains, and as a result many research efforts are being devoted to those upcoming problems. Geospatial data security, especially access control, has attracted increased research interests within the academic community. The tendency towards sharing and interoperability of geospatial data and applications makes it common to acquire and integrate geospatial data from multiple organisations to accomplish a complex task. Meanwhile, many organisations have the requirement for securing access to possessed sensitive or proprietary geospatial data. In this heterogeneous and distributed environment, consistent access control functionality is crucial to promote controlled accessibility. As an extension of general access control mechanisms in the IT domain, the mechanism for geospatial data access control has its own requirements and characteristics of granularity and geospatial logic. In this paper, we address several fundamental aspects concerning the design and implementation of an access control system for geospatial data, including the classification, requirements, authorisation models, storage structures and management approaches for authorisation rules, matching and decision-making algorithms between authorisation rules and access requests, and its policy enforcement mechanisms. This paper also presents a system framework for realising access control functionality for geospatial data, and explain access control procedures in detail.     

Free and open source software for geospatial applications (FOSS4G) to support Future Earth

ABSTRACT

The development, integration, and distribution of the information and spatial data infrastructure (i.e. Digital Earth; DE) necessary to support the vision and goals of Future Earth (FE) will occur in a distributed fashion, in very diverse technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and economic contexts around the world. This complex context and ambitious goals require bringing to bear not only the best minds, but also the best science and technologies available. Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Applications (FOSS4G) offers mature, capable and reliable software to contribute to the creation of this infrastructure. In this paper we point to a selected set of some of the most mature and reliable FOSS4G solutions that can be used to develop the functionality required as part of DE and FE. We provide examples of large-scale, sophisticated, mission-critical applications of each software to illustrate their power and capabilities in systems where they perform roles or functionality similar to the ones they could perform as part of DE and FE. We provide information and resources to assist the readers in carrying out their own assessments to select the best FOSS4G solutions for their particular contexts and system development needs.     

Building geospatial infrastructure

ABSTRACT

Many visions for geospatial technology have been advanced over the past half century. Initially researchers saw the handling of geospatial data as the major problem to be overcome. The vision of geographic information systems arose as an early international consensus. Later visions included spatial data infrastructure, Digital Earth, and a nervous system for the planet. With accelerating advances in information technology, a new vision is needed that reflects today’s focus on open and multimodal access, sharing, engagement, the Web, Big Data, artificial intelligence, and data science. We elaborate on the concept of geospatial infrastructure, and argue that it is essential if geospatial technology is to contribute to the solution of problems facing humanity.     

A hierarchical indexing strategy for optimizing Apache Spark with HDFS to efficiently query big geospatial raster data

ABSTRACT

Earth observations and model simulations are generating big multidimensional array-based raster data. However, it is difficult to efficiently query these big raster data due to the inconsistency among the geospatial raster data model, distributed physical data storage model, and the data pipeline in distributed computing frameworks. To efficiently process big geospatial data, this paper proposes a three-layer hierarchical indexing strategy to optimize Apache Spark with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) from the following aspects: (1) improve I/O efficiency by adopting the chunking data structure; (2) keep the workload balance and high data locality by building the global index (k-d tree); (3) enable Spark and HDFS to natively support geospatial raster data formats (e.g., HDF4, NetCDF4, GeoTiff) by building the local index (hash table); (4) index the in-memory data to further improve geospatial data queries; (5) develop a data repartition strategy to tune the query parallelism while keeping high data locality. The above strategies are implemented by developing the customized RDDs, and evaluated by comparing the performance with that of Spark SQL and SciSpark. The proposed indexing strategy can be applied to other distributed frameworks or cloud-based computing systems to natively support big geospatial data query with high efficiency.     

Automatic search of geospatial features for disaster and emergency management

Although the fast development of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) WFS (Web Feature Service) technologies has undoubtedly improved the sharing and synchronization of feature-level geospatial information across diverse resources, literature shows that there are still apparent limitations in the current implementation of OGC WFSs. Currently, the implementation of OGC WFSs only emphasizes syntactic data interoperability via standard interfaces and cannot resolve semantic heterogeneity problems in geospatial data sharing. To help emergency responders and disaster managers find new ways of efficiently searching for needed geospatial information at the feature level, this paper aims to propose a framework for automatic search of geospatial features using Geospatial Semantic Web technologies and natural language interfaces. We focus on two major tasks: (1) intelligent geospatial feature retrieval using Geospatial Semantic Web technologies; (2) a natural language interface to a geospatial knowledge base and web feature services over the Semantic Web. Based on the proposed framework we implemented a prototype. Results show that it is practical to directly discover desirable geospatial features from multiple semantically heterogeneous sources using Geospatial Semantic Web technologies and natural language interfaces.     

Global geospatial data from Earth observation: status and issues

ABSTRACT

Data covering the whole of the surface of the Earth in a homogeneous and reliable manner has been accumulating over many years. This type of data became available from meteorological satellites from the 1960s and from Earth-observing satellites at a small scale from the early 1970s but has gradually accumulated at larger scales up to the present day when we now have data covering many environmental themes at large scales. These data have been used to generate information which is presented in the form of global data sets. This paper will give a brief introduction to the development of Earth observation and to the organisations and sensors which collect data and produce global geospatial data sets. Means of accessing global data sets will set out the types of data available that will be covered. Digital elevation models are discussed in a separate section because of their importance in georeferencing image data as well as their application to analysis of thematic data. The paper will also examine issues of availability, accuracy, validation and reliability and will look at future challenges.     

关于地理空间元数据技术发展趋势的理论探讨

随着“数字地球”、“数字中国”等的实施,地理空间元数据作为促进海量空间信息管理和共享的有力工具,其应用有了较快的发展。本文在分析我国地理空间元数据应用现状的基础上,结合地理空间元数据的应用特点,分析了地理空间元数据的标准化、互操作、自动生成等趋势是地理空间元数据发展的必然,并论述了与这些发展趋势相关的实施方法和技术,以及这些趋势之间的辩证关系。     

多源地理矢量空间数据融合研究

随着地理信息大数据时代的到来,地理信息与多个行业领域日益深度融合,产生了海量的多源异构数据。多源丰富的空间数据为经济社会发展提供基础支撑作用的同时,其异构性也给数据共享和应用带来了问题与挑战。针对地理空间数据多源、异构、不一致性的现状及特点,本文提出了数据库模式融合与数据库实例融合为一体的多源地理空间数据融合流程与方法,并以基础地理信息、地理国情普查等实例数据进行了分析,为多源空间数据共享与应用提供了解决思路。     

Redefining the possibility of digital Earth and geosciences with spatial cloud computing

Abstract

Global challenges (such as economy and natural hazards) and technology advancements have triggered international leaders and organizations to rethink geosciences and Digital Earth in the new decade. The next generation visions pose grand challenges for infrastructure, especially computing infrastructure. The gradual establishment of cloud computing as a primary infrastructure provides new capabilities to meet the challenges. This paper reviews research conducted using cloud computing to address geoscience and Digital Earth needs within the context of an integrated Earth system. We also introduce the five papers selected through a rigorous review process as exemplar research in using cloud capabilities to address the challenges. The literature and research demonstrate that spatial cloud computing provides unprecedented new capabilities to enable Digital Earth and geosciences in the twenty-first century in several aspects: (1) virtually unlimited computing power for addressing big data storage, sharing, processing, and knowledge discovering challenges, (2) elastic, flexible, and easy-to-use computing infrastructure to facilitate the building of the next generation geospatial cyberinfrastructure, CyberGIS, CloudGIS, and Digital Earth, (3) seamless integration environment that enables mashing up observation, data, models, problems, and citizens, (4) research opportunities triggered by global challenges that may lead to breakthroughs in relevant fields including infrastructure building, GIScience, computer science, and geosciences, and (5) collaboration supported by cloud computing and across science domains, agencies, countries to collectively address global challenges from policy, management, system engineering, acquisition, and operation aspects.     

地理空间数据资源共享交换平台建设初探

地理空间数据资源是国家重要的信息资源和战略资源,利用基础地理空间信息数据,集成和整合与地理空间位置有关的社会经济发展需要的信息数据对推进信息化建设、防止"信息孤岛"及重复投入具有十分重要的意义。本文论述了新疆地理空间数据资源共享交换平台的初期建设情况,通过该平台的建设可以实现全疆地理空间数据资源的跨部门共享交换和开发利用,对于加快新疆地理空间数据资源开放共享机制建立健全的步伐有积极作用。     

基于开放互操作标准的分布式地理空间模型共享研究

传统的单机环境和封闭式网络环境由于有限的资源利用能力, 难以充分支持分散地学数据、模型等资源的共享与应用集成。基于网络环境的信息交换特点, 提出了分布式地理空间模型共享的服务体系。该体系以数据、模型、元数据等互操作要素为核心, 通过网络将数据、模型等网络节点进行开放式耦合。针对地理空间模型服务的互操作问题, 提出了分布式环境下的模型共享服务交互接口, 该接口定义了模型服务元数据、模型服务的交互操作、模型服务的通讯方式等交互规则, 尽可能地降低模型服务与模型终端之间在数据交换、功能调用等方面的互操作困难。为了降低将模型共享为模型服务的实现难度, 设计和开发了地理空间模型共享平台, 并介绍了在该平台上发布地理空间模型的2种方法。最后介绍了研究成果在Prairie生态模型共享方面的应用实践。     

数字地球建设中的地理空间Metadata研究

为解决数字地球建设中现有海量地理空间信息的共建共享,有效管理和利用,结合国际地理空间Metadata标准规范,对数字地球建设中所需的地理空间Metadata的定义,作用,分类,内容,实现模型与实例及其应用进行详细研究和设计,提出用于数字地球建设的地理空间Metadata网络管理系统解决方案,并设计实现了原型系统,为数字地球建设中现有海量地理空间信息的有效管理和共建共享提供了理论基础和切实可行的技术支撑。对国家空间信息基础设施建设和数字地球建设具有重要的推动作用和深远的社会意义。     

基于Petri网的地理信息服务组合模型研究

地理信息服务应用中,单一的功能服务往往无法独立完成复杂的地理信息应用,需要不同粒度的服务组合及协调机制。本文重点研究地理信息服务的组合建模方法,提出基于Petri网的地理信息服务组合建模理论。首先,给出基于Petri网的地理信息服务的定义和图形化描述,然后结合三维地理信息的应用,给出了三维空间分析服务组合的实例分析,最后通过烟草行业的地理信息服务应用验证基于Petri网的服务组合模型的可行性。     

面向服务的地理信息公共平台关键技术研究

地理信息公共平台是数字城市地理空间框架建设的重要内容。基于面向服务的体系架构,本文设计和研究了地理信息公共平台应用的总体模型。空间信息目录服务为分布式地理资源共享集成提供索引,数据在线维护更新和网络空间分析服务实现了多源多专题空间数据的分布式互操作机制。实验采用开放松耦合接口跨部门共建应用模式,在数字城市地理空间框架建设中实践验证本文关键技术具有应用价值。     

Adopting cloud computing to optimize spatial web portals for better performance to support Digital Earth and other global geospatial initiatives

A spatial web portal (SWP) provides a web-based gateway to discover, access, manage, and integrate worldwide geospatial resources through the Internet and has the access characteristics of regional to global interest and spiking. Although various technologies have been adopted to improve SWP performance, enabling high-speed resource access for global users to better support Digital Earth remains challenging because of the computing and communication intensities in the SWP operation and the dynamic distribution of end users. This paper proposes a cloud-enabled framework for high-speed SWP access by leveraging elastic resource pooling, dynamic workload balancing, and global deployment. Experimental results demonstrate that the new SWP framework outperforms the traditional computing infrastructure and better supports users of a global system such as Digital Earth. Reported methodologies and framework can be adopted to support operational geospatial systems, such as monitoring national geographic state and spanning across regional and global geographic extent.     

地理空间信息数据分类与编码方案(英文)

为了实现跨部门、分布式、多源、多专业、多时相、多类型、海量异构地理空间信息数据的一体化组织和管理,根据我国资源环境与基础地理空间信息资源的特点及其应用的需求,参考各部门多年来在地理信息领域积累的分类及编码研究成果及标准,采用线分类的方法,设计了地理要素类的分类体系,并提出了一套基于要素类的统一的地理空间信息数据的编码方案。该方案具有一定的实用性,兼容性,稳定性、系统性和完整性,为我国地理信息的共享提供了支持。     

空间信息全球惟一编码GeoID模型初探

为了解决由于不同数据模型中同一空间实体的编码不惟一而导致数据共享困难以及标识的静态性和无空间位置等问题,本文提出了基于全球剖分格网的空间信息全球惟一编码模型(GeoID),并设计了该编码模型的系统架构,试图实现全球连续的、多层次空间信息的惟一标识。通过对遥感影像中的空间实体进行了编码探讨,结果表明空间信息全球惟一编码模型将大大加快信息的查询与检索速度。