GIS in the Cloud: Implementing a Web Coverage Service on Amazon Cloud Computing Platform

Abstract

With the continuously increment of the available amount of geospatial data, a huge and scalable data warehouse is required to store those data, and a web-based service is also highly needed to retrieve geospatial information. The emergence of Cloud Computing technology brings a new computing information technology infrastructure to general users, which enable the users to requisition compute capacity, storage, database and other service. The Web Coverage Service supports retrieval of geospatial data as digital geospatial information representing space and time varying phenomena. This paper explores the feasibility of utilizing general-purpose cloud computing platform to fulfill WCS specification through a case study of implementing a WCS for raster image on the Amazon Web Service. Challenges in enabling WCS in the Cloud environment are discussed, which is followed by proposed solutions. The resulting system demonstrates the feasibility and advantage of realizing WCS in Amazon Cloud Computing platform.