GeoSquare: collaborative geoprocessing models’ building, execution and sharing on Azure Cloud

Abstract

Collaborative geoprocessing models have become one of the major solutions to significantly enhance the capacity to derive knowledge over a network, which are critical for the support of comprehensive analyses in a virtual geographic environment (VGE). With the emergence and growing maturity of the cloud computing infrastructure, a cloud-based platform for collaborative geoprocessing models promises to provide a pattern for the next generation of geoprocessing collaboration in the GIS realm. However, the problems with the existing collaborative geoprocessing models remain numerous, including the following: heterogeneity in description specifications hinders different geoprocessing services in collaborative work; the heterogeneity in messages mechanisms makes the cooperation among the geoprocessing services difficult and an integrated geoprocessing model framework centring on the collaborative model’s lifecycle is absent. To address these problems, this article proposes a cloud-based framework for building, executing and sharing collaborative models called GeoSquare: (1) a lifecycle model was designed for convenient and flexible collaborative geoprocessing; (2) a collaboration mechanism was implemented to solve specification heterogeneity; (3) a collaboration method and its proxy were used to resolve the heterogeneity in message communication and (4) to acquire better scalability, some elastic cloud features were utilized in the framework. A GeoSquare prototype was implemented on the Microsoft Azure Cloud to demonstrate the applicability and availability. Results show that users can build, execute, publish and share collaborative geoprocessing models with high efficiency in GeoSquare. GeoSquare provides a novel collaborative geoprocessing pattern enabling further geographic research in a cloud infrastructure.

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