SDI Convergence - Nederlandse Commissie voor Geodesie - KNAW

SDI. This evaluation, as well as an analysis of address data in an SDI, confirmed that
there are quite a few similarities between the data grid approach and the requirement
for consolidated address data in an SDI. The evaluation further showed that where a
large number of organisations are involved, such as for a national address database,
and where there is a lack of a single organisation tasked with the management of a national
address database, the data grid is an attractive alternative to other models (Coetzee
and Bishop, 2008). In this article we present Compartimos, a reference model for
an address data grid, which is based on the OGSA data architecture. Compartimos
was developed to gain a better understanding of the components involved in a data
grid approach.
Due to their service, infrastructure and land administration responsibilities, it is commonly
found that it is the local authority that establishes and maintains address data for
its area of jurisdiction (Levoleger and Corbin, 2005; Williamson et al., 2005; Coetzee et
al., 2008). When address data is required for an area that extends across these jurisdictional
boundaries, the data has to be collated from the various local sources. Currently,
many national address databases of the world follow the centralised approach
where address data is loaded into a single centralised database (Paull, 2003; Fahey
and Finch, 2006; Nicholson, 2007). The novel data grid approach proposed in this article
deviates from this centralised approach.
Reports on grid computing for spatial data in general are found in Hua et al. (2005),
Aloisio et al. (2005b), Goodenough et al. (2007), Koutroumpas and Higgins (2008),
Xue et al. (2008) and Aydin et al. (2008). First research reports on Grid computing
technologies in SDI environments are found in the papers by Zhao et al. (2004), Aloisio
et al. (2005a), Shu et al. (2006), Wei et al. (2006) and Di et al. (2008), as well as the
recently launched Geodateninfrastruktur-Grid (GDI-Grid) project (http://www.d-grid.de/
index.php? id=398&L=1), which is part of D-Grid, a long-term German strategic initiative
in Grid computing. It is expected that the recently initiated collaboration between
OGC and the OGF (OGC OGF, 2007) will start adding to the momentum of such publications.
The initial focus of the collaboration is to integrate OGC's OpenGIS Web Processing
Service (WPS) Standard with a range of "back-end" processing environments to
enable large-scale processing, or to use the WPS as a front-end interface to multiple
grid infrastructures, such as TeraGrid, NAREGI, EGEE and the UK’s National Grid
Service. Results from our work suggest that grid-enabling spatial data integration in an
SDI environment should also be explored, i.e. grid-enabling other web services specified
by OGC, such as the Web Feature Service (WFS). The OGC-OGF collaboration
proves that the international geospatial community is increasingly interested in utilising
grid technology as a solution to its problems, while the grid community has found other
users that can benefit from its technology.
In the position paper by Craglia et al. (2008), a group of international geographic and
environmental scientists from government, industry and academia present the vision of
the next generation Digital Earth and identify priority research areas to support this vision,
which include information integration and computational infrastructures. Both
these priority areas are addressed in our research.
Thus the research community, as well as industry, recognises the importance of grid
computing for SDIs and geospatial data in general. The related work confirms that our
approach of the data grid as enabler for sharing address data in an SDI is innovative
and new, and it proves that the work is extremely relevant at this point in time, both in
Computer Science (grid computing) and in Geographic Information Science (SDI). Our
work is unique because Compartimos is designed for address data.
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