International Journal of Digital Earth

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International Journal of Digital Earth

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Redefining the possibility of digital

Earth and geosciences with spatial
cloud computing
a
Chaowei Yang , Yan Xu & Douglas Nebert
Center of Intelligent Spatial Computing for Water/Energy

Sciences, George Mason University , Fairfax , VA , USA
b
Microsoft Research , Redmond , WA , USA
Federal Geographic Data Committee , Reston , VA , USA

Published online: 24 May 2013.
To cite this article: Chaowei Yang , Yan Xu & Douglas Nebert (2013) Redefining the possibility of
digital Earth and geosciences with spatial cloud computing, International Journal of Digital Earth,
6:4, 297-312, DOI: 10.1080/17538947.2013.769783
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International Journal of Digital Earth, 2013

Vol. 6, No. 4, 297312, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2013.769783
Redefining the possibility of digital Earth and geosciences

with spatial cloud computing
Chaowei Yanga*, Yan Xub and Douglas Nebertc
Downloaded by [Universitara M Emineescu Iasi] at 14:41 04 November 2014
Center of Intelligent Spatial Computing for Water/Energy Sciences, George Mason University,
Fairfax, VA, USA; bMicrosoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA; cFederal Geographic
Data Committee, Reston, VA, USA
(Received 31 October 2012; final version received 29 December 2012)
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.
Keywords: EarthCube; CloudGIS; eScience; Earth science; interoperability
1. The challenges of geosciences and Digital Earth

Technology advancements and globalization require the integration of previously
separate fields, including geography, geochemistry, hydrology, environmental sciences,
climate science, soil science, and others in the twenty-first century (National Research
Council [NRC] 2012a) to (1) address international challenges, (2) obtain fresh
approaches for solving complex problems, and (3) protect local, regional, national,
and international interests in the context of an integrated Earth system. The integrated
system also contributes significantly to the human capability in answering many
previous unanswerable scientific enquires, such as those from climate and land use
*Corresponding author. Email: cyang3@gmu.edu
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
298
C. Yang et al.
change, ecosystems, energy and minerals, environmental health, water, and natural
hazards. These existing and emerging international science opportunities as characterized by US Geological Survey include (NRC 2012a) (u1) global natural hazards
planning and responses, (u2) global energy and mineral resource assessments,
(u3) enhanced water sustainability research in desert regions and tropical areas,
(u4) use of climate and land-cover science for decisions on climate adaptation and
natural resource management, (u5) understanding the influence of climate change on
ecosystems, populations, and disease emergence, (u6) clarification and development of
invasive species work using trade patterns, refugee situations, and changing climate
and environment for initial prioritization, (u7) quantitative health-based human
health risk assessment analysis based on contaminant exposure levels, (u8) ecological
and quantitative human health risk assessment analysis based on contaminant
exposure levels, (u9) research in water contamination and supply, (10) water and
ecological science in cold regions sensitive to climate change, and (u11) comprehensive
enhancement of, and accessibility to, essential topographic and geologic map
information through the topological and geological modeling and mapping.
To conduct more in-depth research, National Science Foundation (NSF) also
worked with NRC (2012b) to identify the new research opportunities in geosciences
for the next decade as (n1) early Earth, (n2) thermo-chemical internal dynamics and
volatile distribution, (n3) faulting and deformation processes, (n4) interactions among
climate, surface processes, tectonics, and deep Earth processes, (n5) co-evolution of
life, environment, and climate, (n6) coupled hydrogeomorphic-ecosystem response
to natural and anthropogenic change, (n7) biogeochemical and water cycles in
terrestrial environments and impacts of global change, and (n8) recent advances in
geochronology.
Among the new research frontiers identified for USGS and NSF, u1 and u11 are
unique to USGS and n1, n2, n3, and n8 are unique to NSF. The following are
complementing pairs: u2-u3 with n4, u4-u6 with n5, u7-u8 with n6, and u9-10
with n7. In this regard, although the two sets of geoscience challenges have different
focuses, they complement each other and both identify a priority for training the next
generation geoscientists. And this complementary is considered in Table 1.
While these national and international deep scientific inquiries being addressed,
international efforts are put on the advancements of the technologies to support the
scientific discoveries and applications driven by the Digital Earth concept (Gore
1998) and recently, by the NASA Earth Exchange (NASA 2012) and NSF (2011)
EarthCube effort at a US national level and the intergovernmental Group on Earth
Observation (GEO 2012) at the global level. Under the auspices of the International
Society of Digital Earth, relevant activities defined the research directions and
challenges towards 2020 as a next generation Digital Earth by considering the recent
development and challenges (Craglia et al. 2012; Goodchild et al. 2012). Craglia
et al. (2012) defined five themes for next generation Digital Earth as (d1) a research
challenge, (d2) an information system, (d3) applications, (d4) organizational metaphor, and (d5) a strategic infrastructure.
All these visions call for the readiness of digital technologies for a computing
infrastructure to support the scientific quests and application needs (such as Gore
1998; NSF 2011; Craglia et al. 2012; NASA 2012). The development of sharing and
utilizing computing resources across geographic boundaries provided ideal methodologies to solve the problem and construct such an infrastructure (Yang et al. 2010).
299
The sharing of distributed computing has evolved from early High Performance
Computing (HPC), grid computing, peer-to-peer computing, and cyberinfrastructure to the recent cloud computing, which realizes access to distributed computing
for end users as a utility or ubiquitous service (Yang et al. 2010). Research for
adopting cloud computing to enable or solve the geoscience problems and Digital
Earth challenges have also attracted many computational scientists to investigate the
readiness of cloud computing (as reviewed in section 2 and section 3). Researches
were also conducted to explore how the spatiotemporal principles that govern the
geosciences and Digital Earth can be utilized to optimize the cloud computing and
provide better computing solutions via spatial cloud computing (Yang 2011).
CloudGIS was also brought up as the next generation GIS to provide GIS software
and functionalities through cloud computing platforms (Wu and Wu 2011).
After the publication of the spatial cloud computing definition paper (Yang et al.
2011), we edit this spatial cloud computing special issue to capture the latest
investigations of global scientific communities in utilizing cloud computing to address
the geoscience and Digital Earth challenges and to identify the future research
directions in this emerging field. The next section summarizes, in examples, research
conducted to utilize cloud computing for enabling geoscience and Digital Earth.
Section 3 reviewed the technological advancements for addressing the scientific and
application problems. Section 4 introduces the selected papers, section 5 concludes the
paper with a recommended list of research agenda for spatial cloud computing to
support a new generation of geospatial information system (CloudGIS), and section 6
analyzes how the cloud computing research and capabilities can be utilized to redefine
the possibility of Digital Earth and geosciences.
2. Geosciences enabled by cloud computing

The geosciences enabled by cloud computing include almost all dimensions of the
new geosciences as defined by USGS (NRC 2012a) and NSF (NRC 2012b), for
example:
(1) Early Earth is one of the most challenging subdomains. Research has been
conducted to enable scientists access easily to astrophysics simulation
and visualization through science gateway supported by cloud computing
(Pajorova and Hluchy 2011a) and enables the processing of astronomy data
to search for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars by integrating several
computational clouds including FutureGrid, NERSCs Magellan cloud, and
Amazon EC2 (Vockler et al. 2011). Early Earth research is generally
centralized but the computing is distributed in a SETI@Home fashion with
a relative simpler demand for computing infrastructure.
(2) Energy and mineral science requires a good data management to support
modeling of the generation and distribution of energy. Liu, Wang, and Liu
(2012) used cloud computing to address the data, storage, and processing
demands for energy information management. Energy and mineral science is
relatively complex with very broad spatiotemporal distribution of producers,
managers, and consumers of material/information, and demands a relative
complex computing infrastructure.
300
C. Yang et al.
(3) Climate science faces the grand challenges of big data management and
analysis. Cloud computing has been used to enable the effective management
of large-scale collections of observational data and model output data for
community-defined services such as the Earth System Grid (Schnase et al.
2011). Huang, Gangl, and Bingham (2011) used cloud computing for
climatology services of storing and analyzing spatiotemporal characteristics
of scatterometer data over Antarctica. Tran et al (2011) used cloud
computing and Apache Object Oriented Data Technology synergistically to
form an effective, efficient, and extensible combination to the challenges of
NASA science missions data management at reduced costs. The integration
of climate science and environment, ecological, and health sciences will make
it increasing complex in the next decades.
(4) Traffic management and simulation systems require the (near) real-time
capabilities enabled by cloud computing to (1) solve data-intensive geospatial
problems in urban traffic systems for traffic surveillance management
(Li, Zhang, and Yu 2011), (2) integrate the management of International
Traffic Database and support project communication and publishing (Miska
and Kuwahara 2010), and (3) provide the most environmentally friendly
transport solution with intuitive and individualized services for a dynamic
number of end users (Di Martino, Giorio, and Galioro 2011).
(5) Ecology faces the challenges of storage, scalability, and platform integration
in a global context. Cloud computing and open source has been utilized to
(1) enable storage, scalability, and deployment flexibility for global marine
biogeography data and analyses (Fujioka et al. 2012), (2) setup a platform for
forest pest control to handle the huge amount of pest data (Jiang et al. 2010),
(3) provide worldwide integrated monitoring of the environment and its
inhabitants, understand their interrelationships, improve our ability to
protect the planet and its people by integrating hundreds of thousands of
data sources (Montgomery and Mundt 2010), and (4) support sustainability
research (Mobilia et al. 2009).
(6) Civil engineering and water management is critical for human being, and
Behzad et al. (2011) used both HPC and cloud computing in a hybrid
cyberinfrastructure to support groundwater ensemble runs for forecasting the
availability of fresh water.
(7) Disaster/waste management, disaster monitoring, forecasting, warning, preparation, and response can be supported efficiently by cloud computing
(Liang, Lii, and Chang 2011). For example, Bessis, Asimakopoulou, and
Xhafa (2011) use the next generation emerging technologies for enabling
collective computational intelligence in managing disaster situations.
Ishikawa, Sugiyama, and Sasaki (2011) investigated using cloud computing
and satellite images to monitor and simulate the dispersion of industrial
waste to reduce waste impact.
(8) Human and environment health is another example needing global computational flexibility and extensibility that can be provided by cloud computing
for prediction analyses (Bohm, Mehler-Bicher, and Fenchel 2011). Shen et al.
(2012) used service-oriented architecture and cloud computing to support
analysis and visualization of medical data highlighting the global variation of
health data by geography, living habits, and cultures. Eriksson et al. (2011)
301
used a hybrid cloud-based simulation architecture for pandemic influenza

simulation and found that it is possible to develop a scalable simulation
environment using cloud computing.
Among these examples, the most popular domains (such as energy, transportation,
civil engineering, disaster/waste management, and human and environment health)
will benefit the most from cloud computing to support the massively distributed and
concurrent end-user requests with elasticity, on-demand, and pay-as-you-go features
(Yang et al. 2011).
3. Key technology advancements for cloud computing
Besides the virtualization, web services, and service-oriented architecture technologies, the driving fundamental technologies of cloud computing include (1) parallel
computing, (2) multitasking supported by multiple computers and cores, and
(3) distributed or collaborative processing through the natural distribution of data,
problems, computations, and users. There are many efforts to explore the parallelization aspect of cloud computing. For example, Tilevich and Eugster (2010) organized a
workshop to explore programming support innovations to address the emerging
distributed applications and the state-of-the-art of their programming support.
Akdogan et al. (2010) studied the problem of parallel geospatial query processing
using the MapReduce programming model with spatial index and Voronoi diagrams.
Wang and Liu (2008) researched parallel computing architecture structure based on
cloud computing for parallelizing data-mining algorithms. Zhang (2010) developed a
parallel spatial statistics module for visual explorations on top of Personal HPC-G in
combination with cloud computing. van Zyl et al. (2012) extended multitasking and
distributed processing capabilities for Earth observation scientific workflows in
a distributed computing environment to allow these geospatial processes to be
seamlessly executed across distributed resources. Karimi, Roongpiboonsopit, and
Wang (2011) studied distributed algorithms for geospatial data processing on clouds
and compared their experimentation with an existing cloud platform to evaluate its
performance for real-time geoprocessing. Panchul, Akopian, and Jamshidi (2011)
reported that depending on the applications, the best possible results are produced
by different parallelization approaches from hardware-implemented parallelism to
software multithreading. Considering the driving principle and the requirements of
geosciences and Digital Earth, the enablement by cloud computing lies in the
advancements of several key techniques:
(1) System architecture is the key to a successful computing platform. Cloud
computing is the latest success of the distributed computing architectural
paradigm after HPC and Grid Computing (Mateescu, Gentzsch, and
Ribbens 2011). Current solutions utilizing cloud computing may benefit
from the integration of a hybrid framework of HPC, grid, cloud, and cluster
computing to solve problems of large-scale sciences such as Earth science,
astronomy, and related sciences (Pajorova and Hluchy 2011b). An optimization strategy is also proposed (Cui et al. 2011) to unify the management of
spatial data from multiple sources using cloud computing and existing legacy
systems. Rothenberg (2010) reviewed developments that have taken place in
302
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
C. Yang et al.
architecting data center networks to meet the requirements of the cloud
and speculated on the potential impacts of such computing developments
in shaping the future Internet by driving incentives of adoption of new
protocols and architectural changes.
Visualization is a key to the success of cloud computing by providing easy-touse interfaces to domain specialists without advanced technical knowledge
(i.e. meteorologists, geography specialists, hydrologists, etc.) to manipulate
Big Data in Earth observation and geosciences (Stefanut, Popescu, and
Gorgan 2011). Many research efforts, such as that by Pitcher (2009), have
been conducted to investigate cloud computing in combination with virtual
Earth and computer graphics to provide easy-to-use visualization interfaces
for end users.
Big Data is a popular challenge that cuts across all geoscience and Digital
Earth subdomains. The advancement of managing and processing Big Data
can be greatly enhanced by using cloud computing (Karimi, Roongpiboonsopit, and Wang, 2011) to support geoprocessing for real-time navigation
applications. On the other hand, current cloud computing platforms require
improvements and special tools for handling efficiently real-time geoprocessing, such as iGNSS QoS prediction (Karimi, Roongpiboonsopit, and Wang,
2011).
Real-time data processing is required by many geoscience and Digital Earth
applications. Cloud computing could enable the real-time response with
virtually unlimited resources and on demand services within minutes for
applications, such as geo-streaming (Kazemitabar, Banaei-Kashani, and
McLeod 2011) and the GEOSS clearinghouse (Huang et al. 2010).
Data storage is another challenge related to Big Data support. Cloud
computing can provide inexpensive and simple solution for users to post
and share data on the web (Bunzel, Ager, and Schrader-Patton 2010). Ji`cek
and Di Massimo (2011) reported users can easily upload and store public
data into the Microsoft Cloud, while leveraging the Windows Azure Platform
and environment for processing. However, data storage and management
need additional research to reduce the hosting cost for inherently large
volumes of Earth Science data and maintaining an easy-to-use experience.
Data and process co-location is a key optimization approach that may
improve cloud throughput. This means the data processing can be conducted
at different places according to scheduling strategy by either shipping the
data or the processing modules to address the significant latency arising from
frequent access to large datasets and corresponding data movement between
distributed data centers (Deng et al. 2011). Liu et al. (2011) argued that the
most related datasets can be placed into the same data center based on
the data dependence at workflow build-time; the tasks are then scheduled to
their most closely related data centers for execution and the newly generated
data-sets are put into the data center that has the most dependency at
workflow runtime.
Key spatial methods must be implemented in the cloud to provide basic
support to Digital Earth and geosciences (Goodchild et al. 2012). Key
methods, including spatial data storage, spatial indexing, and spatial
operations, should be researched systematically with respect to optimal use
303
of cloud computing (Wang and Wang 2010). The combination of cloud

computing with geoscience and Digital Earth problems could also generate
new key spatial methods, such as optimal spanning tree for securing
distributed data replicas in geographically dispersed clouds (He et al. 2012)
and spatiotemporal indexing to improve cloud application efficiency in a
global or regional scale.
(8) Standardization and interoperability are keys to integrate systems across
diverse cloud platforms. For the geoscience and Digital Earth applications,
the standards and interoperability sit in the Web service interface level of
cloud computing architecture. Examples include investigation into the best
cloud deployment approach to support the Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC) Web Coverage Service specification (Shao et al. 2011), how OGC Web
service standards are becoming ubiquitous in cloud computing environments
replacing old computing models for geoprocessing (Reichardt 2010), and how
the application interoperability bottleneck in a data-intensive application can
be solved by cloud computing (Wu, Wu, and Huang 2010).
(9) Event detection and computing is essential for best utilizing cloud computing
resource to support autoscaling for elasticity and utility characteristics.
Detecting events in cloud computing platforms (Helmer, Poulovassilis, and
Xhafa 2011) will require new spatiotemporal algorithms to exploit the
scalability of cloud computers while working within the limits of state
synchronization across multiple servers in the cloud (Olson et al. 2011).
These technological advancements will pave routes for implementing cloud
computing and enabling geosciences and Digital Earth. The full implementation
of the five National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST 2011) cloud
computing characteristics will further the advancement and foundation building of
the cloud computing for geosciences and Digital Earth.
4. Introduction to the papers
We called for and received 25 abstract submissions and invited 10 full paper
submissions. Five papers were selected for publication based on a rigorous peer
review process.
Liu et al. (2013) reported research using Microsoft Azure to support the
on-demand requirement of groundwater supply analyses using Texas and Arizona
examples. Technology and license problems were solved by integrating Azure and
Dropbox for computing, integrating desktop and cloud for software license access,
and transferring files between the desktop and the cloud for data sharing. They
found that cloud computing could enhance groundwater analyses by providing
informed uncertainty analysis results that assist groundwater planning and sustainability analysis.
Dust storms are a challenging natural hazard facing us in the twenty-first century
with an increasing frequency and broad geographic and socioeconomic impacts. The
prediction of dust storms involves modeling uncertainty and requires significant
computing resources. Taking the computing challenge and exploring spatiotemporal
optimization (Yang et al. 2011), Huang et al. (2013) utilized cloud computing to
provision large quantities of computing resources on-demand for a short time period
304
C. Yang et al.
to support high-resolution dust storm forecasting over large geographic region, while
reducing the cost of forecasting by exploiting the measured service and elastic
capabilities of the cloud environment.
Wen et al. (2013) reported using cloud computing to support an open environment
for sharing geographic analyses models. To solve the heterogeneity problem, they used
several strategies of model description, model encapsulation, model deployment, and
transparent access, and verified the strategies with an experimental environment
established on a cloud computing platform. They also identified several future
research challenges including interoperability, performance, system security, load
balancing, and quality of service assessment.
Following the parallelization spirit, Kim and Tsou (2013) compares cloud
computing approaches to those of grid computing using WebGIS-based geoprocessing simulations. They found that with limited amount of parallelization, grid
computing has a better performance but with increased parallelization, cloud
computing performance is comparable. Their research proves cloud computing to
be a viable solution for enabling computation and data-intensive processing for
complex GIS models. From an accessibility aspect, the on-demand aspects of
commercial cloud computing allows timely access at low cost. They also commented
that different instances of cloud computing can satisfy different WebGIS computing
needs; therefore, assessments should be conducted to evaluate the best-fit cloud
instance for specific applications.
Yue et al. (2013) provide a comparative analysis of the design and implementation of geoprocessing services in Microsoft Azure and Google App Engine. The
research compares the running environment, programming language, application
framework, storage service, and platform application programming interfaces for
both cloud platforms for geoprocessing functions. The result provides the reference
on selectively utilizing cloud computing platforms in a hybrid cloud pattern. The
research shows that virtualization is the key for portable geoprocessing cloud
services. The performance tests demonstrate how the cloud computing can support
the on-demand geoprocessing and economic deployment of geoprocessing services.
In addition to the five accepted papers, we added this field review paper, fully
reviewed by a broader expert base and the community, to capture the state-of-the-art
and to identify the future research directions.
5. Research directions and towards a research agenda

Cloud computing provides enabling capabilities for geosciences and Digital Earth in
the twenty-first century. The eventual success of the spatial cloud computing and the
next generation GIS CloudGIS will be determined in five aspects (Luftman
and Zadeh 2011): (1) improvements to research productivity and cost reduction;
(2) alignment to current information technology (IT) procedure; (3) agility and speed
in responding to computing needs; (4) ease of application in scientific research; and
(5) improvement in the reliability and efficiency of IT. As global collaboration
requires, cloud computing in support of geosciences and Digital Earth will transcend
organizations, jurisdictional boundaries, and continents (NRC 2011b). The potential
impediments and solutions can be addressed relative to policy, management, system
engineering, acquisition, and operations requirements to ensure the eventual success
305
of CloudGIS. The following cloud computing research directions need additional

attention from the interdisciplinary domains:
(1) Continuing visions for geosciences and Digital Earth will provide driving
demands for cloud computing advancements. These visions could include,
to name a few, smart/intelligent Earth (Liu et al. 2010) and campus (Liu,
Xie, and Peng 2009); virtual geographic environment (Lin et al. 2011);
global military conflict simulator (Tanase and Urzica 2009); global sharing
of Earth observation data (Huang et al. 2010); new cartography (Meng
2011); and security, data, and future of computing (IEEE 2011).
(2) Cloud interoperability has to rely on the standards developed by different
organizations, such as OGC, OGF, NIST, ISO, and IEEE, through a
systematic architecture designed to support the sharing of distributed
computing resources at different levels. This has to be driven by large user
groups, application domains, vendors, and governments to achieve the
required level of interoperability (Lee 2010).
(3) New visualization and interactive systems for cloud computing will be
essential to support ease-of-use and straightforward access (Vogel 2011).
For example, regional arctic systems modeling (Roberts et al. 2010) and a
polar research cyberinfrastructure (Yang, Nebert, and Taylor, 2011) require
a computing infrastructure that is easily accessible, extensible, and usable.
(4) Reliability and availability is a challenge to achieve in a cloud platform
where most components are distributed and independently managed. This
includes being able to access the platform from different regions and the
efficiency of the access.
(5) Real-time simulation and access is essential for different types of decision
support from emergency response to individual decisions. Relevant research
should include theory-based simulation and multiscale, multicomponent
modeling, as well as data-intensive and interactive visualization capability
for both cloud computing platforms and applications (NRC 2011a).
(6) Cloud management needs significant improvement to meet the five characteristics defined by NIST (2011). Systematic management at the enterprise level
to support semiautomatic engineering operations for the cloud and the entire
information system will be essential (Choi and Lee 2010).
(7) Cloud outreach should help convey the message to (potential) users properly
with its own strengths and shortcomings.
(8) Security is a big concern when utilizing cloud computing to deploy a
distributed platform with certain information, for example, for labor and
social security applications (Lu 2010). Examples include a secure web
environment to develop phenologic matrices from linked media in real time
(OLeary and Kaufman 2011) and creation of international license agreements or exceptions to ensure that export-controlled technical data stored on
the cloud is secure and protected (Schoorl 2012). It will be a continuing
challenge in how to ensure the protection of sensitive data, privacy, and
systems while maintaining the sharing spirit of cloud computing.
(9) Spatiotemporal optimization is key to fully realize the benefit of cloud
computing to geoscience, computing infrastructure, Digital Earth, and
education (Yang et al. 2011). Addressing fundamental science questions and
306
C. Yang et al.
application problems and optimizing the cloud computing platforms with

spatiotemporal principles will help lay the foundation to implement spatial
cloud computing (Yang et al. 2010).
(10) Global collaboration is important to make a difference on several fronts:
(1) the integration of multiple scientific domains through common information science platforms will require global collaboration (Yang et al. 2010);
(2) GIScience advancement will depend on global collaboration from the
identified directions of (g1) position technology for knowing where everything is, at all times, (g2) citizen science and crowd-sourcing, (g3) dynamic
or spatiotemporal events, (g4) the 3rd, 4th, and 5th dimensions, and (g5) the
challenge of education (Goodchild 2010); (3) Craglia et al (2012) also
emphasized the importance of global collaboration for the next generation
Digital Earth in the light of the many developments from IT, data infrastructures, and Earth observation. It is essential to develop a series of
collaborations at the global level to turn the vision into reality.
In addition to this list, other research frontiers should be added when needed. For
example, cloud-based knowledge discovery will require data mining and knowledge
discovering across linked data distributed worldwide and without fully accessing the
actual data.
6. Enabling the visions with cloud technologies

This section provides an analysis of how the spatial cloud computing advancements
and future research would enable the visions. Two levels are identified as kernel
support (marked with x) or lightly dependent (without mark). This may serve as
Table 1. Geoscience vision and the spatial cloud computing research (u1u11 and n1n8 are
in section 1 and adopted from NRC 2012a, 2012b).
Technologies\vision
Architecture
Visualization
Big data
Real-time
Data storage
Co-location
Spatial methods
Interoperability
Event
Vision
Reliability
Cloud management
Communication
Security
Spatiotemporal
Collaboration
USGS u1 u2 u3 u4 u5 u6 u7 u8 u9 u10 u11

NSF
n4
n5
n6
n7
n1 n2 n3 n8
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
x
X
x
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
307
Table 2. Digital Earth vision and the spatial cloud computing research (d1d5 are in section 1
adopted from Craglia et al. 2012).
Technologies\vision
d1
research
d2
system
d3
application
X
X
X
X
X
X
Architecture
Visualization
Big data
Real-time
Data storage
Co-location
gis methods
Interoperability
Event
Vision
Reliability
Cloud management
Communication
Security
Spatiotemporal
Collaboration
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
d4
metaphor
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
d5
infrastructure
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
Table 3. GIScience vision and the spatial cloud computing research (g1g5 are in 10th item of
section 5 adopted from Goodchild 2010).
Technologies\vision
Architecture
Geovisualization
Big data
Real-time
Data storage
Co-location
gis methods
3Interoperability
Event research
Vision
Reliability
Cloud management
Communication
Security
Spatiotemporal
Collaboration
g1.
position
g2. citizen
science
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
g3.
dynamics
g4. 3
dimension
g5.
education
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
a reference in conducting research of spatial cloud computing to enable the visions.

The technologies are detailed in section 3 and section 5.
Table 1 illustrates that natural hazards, water sustainability, climate adaptation
and natural resource management, environmental and human health will be very
comprehensive and require advancements in all different technological aspects to
308
C. Yang et al.
address the problems. It also illustrates that visualization, spatial methods, and
spatiotemporal studies will be key areas for most geoscience domains.
Table 2 illustrates that Digital Earth as an infrastructure will foster the
advancements of different technological aspects of cloud computing. Big Data,
event, and cloud management will be the key technologies for enabling Digital Earth
and geosciences.
Table 3 illustrates that education will be critical for cloud computing.
Geovisualization, events, and spatiotemporal studies will be the key areas of GIS
that enables the advancements of cloud computing.
Acknowledgements
Research is supported by State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs (20120464001),
NSF (IIP-1160979 and CNS-1117300), FGDC (GeoCloud and GEOSS Clearinghouse), and
Microsoft Research. Drs. Dennis Guo, Xiang Li, Ziyong Zhou, Yang Hong, Peng Yue, Rick
Kim, Yong Liu, Qunying Huang, Min Chen, Xinyue Ye, and Santonu Goswami reviewed the
manuscript. We sincerely thank Drs. Huadong Guo and Changlin Wang for inviting us to
organize the special issue and facilitating the process of developing this special issue.
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