TopoLens: Building a CyberGIS community data service for enhancing the usability of high-resolution national topographic datasets: TopoLens

In recent years, geospatial data have exploded to massive volume and diversity and subsequently cause serious usability issues for researchers in various scientific areas. This paper describes a cyberGIS community data service framework to facilitate geospatial big data access, processing, and sharing based on a hybrid supercomputer architecture. Specifically, the framework aims to enhance the usability of national elevation dataset released by the U.S. Geological Survey in the contiguous United States at the resolution of 1/3 arc-second. A community data service, namely TopoLens, is created to demonstrate the workflow integration of national elevation dataset and the associated computation and analysis. Two user-friendly environments, including a publicly available web application and a private workspace based on the Jupyter notebook, are provided for users to access both precomputed and on-demand computed high-resolution elevation data. The system architecture of TopoLens is implemented by exploiting the ROGER supercomputer, the first cyberGIS supercomputer dedicated to geospatial problem-solving. The usability of TopoLens has been acknowledged in the topographic user community evaluation.