Effective Acquisition of Geospatial Data Products in a Collaborative Grid Environment

Geospatial data is playing an increasingly important role in many areas. But there are still many problems associated with the effective use of geospatial data. One is that geospatial data is usually large in volume and is archived at geographically distributed data centers. Another is that the low-level geospatial data contains raw data instead of information that can be directly applied by users. In this paper, we discuss solutions to some of the problems based on the grid and SOA technologies. Specifically, we propose an architecture that can effectively manage large volumes of distributed geospatial data, the concept of virtual geospatial data products, and a mechanism that supports on-demand productions of customized geospatial data products. A prototypical system based on the architecture and concept has been implemented and demonstrated