Exploration of cloud computing technologies for geographic information services

Cloud computing is network-based computing, which enables people to run modeling applications on a virtual server or thousands of servers. With the development of cloud computing technology, the public can use computing power just like the way they use water, electricity, gas and telephone. Geographic information is one of the resources over the network, and there are increasing demands of spatial-intensive applications. The cloud providers should take account of geographic information services. In this paper, we expound some key technologies of cloud computing, such as Distributed File System (DFS), Map-Reduce, and Bigtable. Then regarding geographic information Services, we designed a cloud computing architecture, which consists of application, visualization, services, computing, storing and infrastructure layers. We will analyze how these clouding computing technologies can be applied to the implementation of geographic information cloud computing platform.