Standards-Based Computing Capabilities for Distributed Geospatial Applications I t is said that 80 to 90 percent of all information is geospatially related. Whatever the exact percent- age, geospatial information clearly has immense applicability across the spectrum of human endeavor. Examples include oil and gas explora- tion, weather forecasting and tracking, aviation, satellite ground systems, environmental planning, disaster man- agement, public administration (e-government), civic planning and engineering, and all manner of e-sciences. All such activities entail gathering significant amounts of data and other critical information that must be stored, accessed, and managed. With our planet’s growing “infomass,” researchers face increasingly large repositories, archives, and librar- ies of geospatial data that are inherently distributed across many institutions and countries. Even within organizations, such data collections can be stored in different locations and in various formats and schemas. In addition, a growing number of in situ sensors gather data continuously. Many geospatial applications require not only data from multiple heterogeneous sources but also special processing resources available at remote sites, including high-performance computing. Grid computing addresses this need for data diversity, processing resource chains, and HPC, along with other requirements such as secu- rity and digital rights management, in a distributed environment. The “Distributed Geospatial Computing Initiatives” sidebar lists a few important projects that use grid-based geospatial applications. NEED FOR STANDARDS The ability to access, integrate, analyze, and present geospatial data across a distributed computing environ- ment using common tools has tremendous value. Indeed, with the growing connectedness of our world—through data-collecting instruments, data centers, supercomput- ers, departmental machines, and personal devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and smart phones—as a society we expect a wide range of information to be instantly accessible from anywhere. This expectation is motivated not only by personal convenience; there are also solid business and policy reasons for enabling such distributed geospatial applications. Achieving such ease of access and interoperation will require best practices that are codified into widely adopted standards. In the context of e-Science, the National Science Foundation’s Cyberinfrastructure Council argues that “the use of standards creates economies of scale and scope for developing and deploying common resources, tools, software, and services that enhance the use of cyberinfrastructure in multiple science and engineering communities. This approach allows maximum interoperability and shar- ing of best practices. A standards-based approach will ensure that access to cyberinfrastructure will be inde- Researchers face increasingly large repositories of geospatial data stored in different locations and in various formats. To address this problem, the Open Geospatial Consortium and the Open Grid Forum are collaborating to develop standards for distributed geospatial computing. Craig Lee, Open Grid Forum and The Aerospace Corporation George Percivall, Open Geospatial Consortium COVER FEATURE 50 Computer Published by the IEEE Computer Society 0018-9162/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE