Geospatial Service Web: Towards integrated cyberinfrastructure for GIScience

A geospatial cyberinfrastructure is needed to support advanced GIScience research and education activities. However, the heterogeneous and distributed nature of geospatial resources creates enormous obstacles for building a unified and interoperable geospatial cyberinfrastructure. In this paper, we propose the Geospatial Service Web (GSW) to underpin the development of a future geospatial cyberinfrastructure. The GSW excels over the traditional spatial data infrastructure by providing a highly intelligent geospatial middleware to integrate various geospatial resources through the Internet based on interoperable Web service technologies. The development of the GSW focuses on the establishment of a platform where data, information, and knowledge can be shared and exchanged in an interoperable manner. Theoretically, we describe the conceptual framework and research challenges for GSW, and then introduce our recent research toward building a GSW. A research agenda for building a GSW is also presented in the paper.