Spatial Data Resource Index in Grid Environment

Grid is a promise technology which could easily share distributed heterogeneous computing resources. It brings together geographically and organizationally dispersed computational resources. This paper presented a framework that aggregated the spatial resources based on grid technology, OGC specification and spatial data index. First, a grid environment for sharing geospatial data resources was setup by GlobusToolkits(GT); an effective architecture was designed for managing spatial data in a grid environment. Secondly all the geospatial resource was described by geographic markup language (GML), which could describe the metadata of heterogeneous data effectively. And with monitor and discovery service (MDS), a service discovery framework was implemented, with the framework; all the grid services encapsulated with the Web service resource framework (WSRF) could be easily discovered. Then with calling these services, the spatial data could be easily discovered. A spatial data index was also built up by R-tree for access of data more effectively. We implemented the spatial data discovery framework and experiments indicated that spatial data could be easily discovered in the grid environment effectively and reliably.