Implementing Geospatial Web Services for Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is concerned with the provision of hardware, infrastructure, software and data as services on the internet. A key attraction of cloud computing is that the infrastructure from which services are offered is able to scale upwards automatically as the load on the services increases. This chapter examines the potential for offering capabilities of the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) as a service within a compute cloud. GRASS is a free and open source desktop Geographic Information System (GIS). The chapter describes a prototype service that adopts the Web Processing Service (WPS) standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). A case study is presented applying the prototype in the analysis of satellite imagery. The chapter concludes that the WPS standard can facilitate the provision of geospatial capability in compute clouds.