TeraGrid GIScience Gateway: Bridging Cyberinfrastructure and GIScience
International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 1362-3087, Volume 23, Issue 5, 2009, Pages 631 – 656
Shaowen Wang and Yan Liu
“Cyberinfrastructure (CI) represents the integrated information and communication technologies for distributed information processing and coordinated knowledge discovery, and is promising to revolutionize how science and engineering are conducted in the twenty-first century. The value of bridging CI and GIScience is significant to advance CI and benefit GIScience research and education, particularly in distributed geographic information processing (DGIP). This article presents a holistic framework that bridges CI and GIScience by integrating CI capabilities to empower GIScience research and education and establish generic DGIP services supported by CI. The framework, the TeraGrid GIScience Gateway, is based on a CI science gateway approach developed on the National Science Foundation (NSF) TeraGrid – a key element of US and world CI. This gateway develops a unifying service-oriented framework with respect to its architecture, design, and implementation as well as its integration with the TeraGrid. The functions of the gateway focus on enabling parallel and distributed processing for geographical analysis, managing the complexity of TeraGrid software environment, and establishing a Web-based GIS for the GIScience community to gain shared and collaborative access to TeraGrid-based geospatial processing services. The gateway implementation uses Web 2.0 technologies to create a highly configurable and interactive multiuser environment. Two case studies, Bayesian geostatistical modeling and a spatial statistic 
for detecting local clustering, are used to demonstrate the gateway functions and user environment. The service transformation for these analyses is applied to create a shared, decentralized, and collaborative geographical analysis environment in which GIScience community users can contribute new analysis services and reuse existing gateway services.”
Trackbacks