Spatial Data Sharing on Grid

The Internet technology has already changed the Information Society in profound ways, and will continue to do so. Nowadays many people foresee that there is a similar trajectory for the next generation of Internet - Grid Technology. As an emerging computational and networking infrastructure, Grid Computing is designed to provide pervasive, uniform and reliable access to data, computational and human resources distributed in a dynamic, heterogeneous environment. On the other hand, the development of Geographic Information System (GIS) has been highly influenced by the evolution of information technology such as the Internet, telecommunications, software and various types of computing technology. In particular, in the distributed GIS domain, the development has made significant impact in the past decade. However, due to the closed and centralized legacy of the architecture and the lack of interoperability, modularity, and flexibility, current distributed GIS still cannot fully accommodate the distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous and speedy development in network and computing environments. Hence, the development of a high performance distributed GIS system is still a challenging task. So, the development of Grid computing technology undoubtedly provides a unique opportunity for distributed GIS, and a Grid Computing based GIS paradigm becomes inevitable. This paper proposes a new computing platform based distributed GIS framework – the Grid Geographic Information System (G2IS).