Using Knowledge to Facilitate Better Data
Discovery, Access, and Utilization for
CloudGIS
Chaowei Phil Yang, Co-Director
Center of Intelligent Spatial Computing for Water/Energy Science
Zhipeng Gui, Kai Liu, Abdelmounaam Rezgui, Qunying Huang and
Chen Xu, CISC, COS, GMU, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4444
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Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Why a CloudGIS? flooding analyses
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Why a CloudGIS?
What if we can
• Integrate all geospatial data, information,
knowledge, processing in a few minutes
• Generate and send the right information in real time
to the people including decision makers, first
responders, and other stakeholders
This dream requires a platform and GIS that
• can be ready in a few minutes
• can reach out to all people needed
• only cost for the amount of system used
• won’t cost to maintain after the emergency
response
This requires a new generation of GIS -- CloudGIS
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
GEOSS Clearinghouse
 Objectives
 Share Global Earth Observation Data Among 140+ Countries to Address Global
Challenges of Natural Hazards and Emergency Responses
 Support Global End Users to Discover, Access, and Utilize EO Data
 Provide Responses to End Users in Seconds
 Advanced Computing Technologies
• Ontology and semantics indexing of metadata elements
• Cloud Computing (EC2 & Azure) Responds to Spike Massive
Concurrent End Users
• Cloud DB (SQLAzure) Manages Millions to Billions of
Metadata Records
• WebGIS & 5D Vis Tools to Visualizes EO Data
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Vocabularies and Semantics
 Dynamic Distributed Search for Federated Catalogs
 Rank Results
 Support Provenance
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Use Ontology (of Resource Categorization and Quality) to
Support Utilization
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Demo
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Pooled, Elastic, On-Demand, Pay-as-you-go CloudGIS
Yang C., Wu H., Li Z., Huang Q., Li J., 2011, Utilizing Spatial Principles to Optimize Distributed Computing for Enabling Physical
Sciences, Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 108(14): 5498-5503.
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Pooled, Elastic, On-Demand, Pay-as-you-go CloudGIS
Yang C., Goodchild M., Huang Q., Nebert D., Raskin R., Bambacus M., Xu Y., Fay D., 2011. Spatial Cloud Computing - How can
geospatial sciences use and help to shape cloud computing, International Journal of Digital Earth. (4), 305-329.
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
A Conceptual Framework for CloudGIS
Yang C., Bambacus M., Benedict K., Nebert D., Mochuney D., Hazlett S., Houser P., Raskin R., Xu Y., Fay D., Rezgui A.,
Huang Q., and Xu C., 2011. Using Metadata, Data/Service Quality and Knowledge to Facilitate Better Data Discovery,
Access, and Utilization for Supporting EarthCube, http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/13812/=024_Yang.pdf.
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Ontology Related Research Needs
1) The interoperably integrating currently isolated clouds from multiple domains
2) The evolution of cloud from a technology-centered to a human-centered paradigm
3) The advancement of cloud to enable multiple science domains in simulating
complex phenomena
4) More study in social sciences is urgently needed to enable efficient governance
and collaboration among team members, communities, and domains
5) Work must be done to improve knowledge capturing/sharing/utilizing
6) Improved methods for generating and capturing metadata as a parallel process with
data product generation
7) Thinking and computing in a spatiotemporal fashion will provide an enabling
capability for the new geoscience frontier by contributing essential computing
architectures, algorithms, and methodologies
8) To investigate the connections and interactions across different geospatial
subsystems
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011
Sponsors and Collaborators
Spatial Ontology Community of Practice Workshop, USGS, Dec.2, 2011