Sharing of distributed geospatial data through grid technology

With the rapid accumulation of geospatial data and the advancement of geoscience, there is a critical requirement for an infrastructure that can integrate large-scale, heterogeneous, and distributed storage systems for the sharing of geospatial data within multiple user communities. This article probes into the feasibility to share distributed geospatial data through Grid computing technology by introducing several major issues (including system heterogeneity, uniform mechanism to publish and discover geospatial data, performance, and security) to be faced by geospatial data sharing and how Grid technology can help to solve these issues. Some recent research efforts, such as ESG and the Data Grid system in GMU CSISS, have proven that Grid technology provides a large-scale infrastructure which can seamlessly integrate dispersed geospatial data together and provide uniform and efficient ways to access the data.