GeoCloud4SDI: a cloud enabled open framework for development of spatial data infrastructure at city level.

Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is considered as a holistic framework for effective collection, integration, discovery, sharing and delivery on a common platform for better utilization of multi-source geospatial data by global community, thereby, resulting in increased awareness of the use of geospatial data and the cooperation between decision-makers and stakeholders. Cloud computing technology can provide convenient and on-demand network access to shared computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction, and has been widely used in different applications. However, much research could not be found related to adoption of cloud computing in development of SDI at various levels from local to country. The present research is a step forward to fill this research gap by development of an open, interoperable and efficient framework for implementation of SDI at City level (acronym GeoCloud4SDI) for Prayagraj city (India) and deploying the same on OpenStack private cloud. Accordingly, multi-tier client server web GIS based SDI architecture and cloud enabled SDI services and workflow using load balancing and elastic computing architecture is developed. The novel framework for GeoCloud4SDI is developed using four layers, namely, (i) physical layer, (ii) cloud services layer, (iii) geospatial services layer and (iv) client layer. The physical layer and the cloud services layer combined together enables the access of virtualized computing resources from the cloud to enhance the performance of City level SDI. Geospatial services layer provides two different functionalities, namely, (a) management, retrieval and access of spatial data and metadata, and (b) retrieval of cloud services from cloud service layer. The performance of GeoCloud4SDI is examined by cloud enabled load balancing and elastic computing framework and the results show the response time reduced up to 50.43% along with 1.95 s performance gain for 1000 concurrent requests. The developed and implemented cloud enabled framework of GeoCloud4SDI is built via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant interoperable service standards using Open Source Software (OSS), thereby ensuring standardisation and interoperability, and can also be adopted for other cities in India and the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]