Geospatial Web Services for Geospatial Cloud Computing Paradigm: Architectures and Selective Applications Case Studies

Anything present on the surface of earth is a geospatial feature on which study and analysis can be made by researchers and scientists. This Geoinformation analysis can be performed for a huge variety of area namely, climate change, real estate, and conservation of ecosystem. To further increase the usability and processing capabilities on a huge set of spatial data, cloud computing paradigm is integrated which will increase the processing and computation power during manipulation and updation of Geoinformation over the web. The web services are generally standardized over Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) following a client - server model focusing on major clients like mobile client, thick and thin clients. To demonstrate further this paper has rephrased a Web Services architecture based on all the case studies and papers that has put web services into use for various contexts. The architecture has a client layer, data layer and an application layer that consists of the web services such as Web Map Services (WMS), Web Coverage Services (WCS), Web Features Services (WFS) and Catalog Services of the Web (CSW). The current paper showcases certain case studies on the implementation of Geospatial Web services over a wide catagory of usage such as healthcare, climate change, disaster management, education, institutional data retrieval, heritage event management and many more, along with a brief of how the services were implemented with an integration of cloud computing.