Geospatial information infrastructures

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Geospatial information infrastructures (GIIs) provide the technological, semantic,organizationalandlegalstructurethatallowforthediscovery,sharing,and use of geospatial information (GI). In this chapter, we introduce the overall concept and surrounding notions such as geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial datainfrastructures(SDI).WeoutlinethehistoryofGIIsintermsoftheorganizational andtechnologicaldevelopmentsaswellasthecurrentstate-of-art,andreflectonsome of the central challenges and possible future trajectories. We focus on the tension betweenincreasedneedsforstandardizationandtheever-acceleratingtechnological changes. We conclude that GIIs evolved as a strong underpinning contribution to implementation of the Digital Earth vision. In the future, these infrastructures are challengedtobecomeflexibleandrobustenoughtoabsorbandembracetechnological transformationsandtheaccompanyingsocietalandorganizationalimplications.With this contribution, we present the reader a comprehensive overview of the field and a solid basis for reflections about future developments

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

Large Scale In Silico Screening on Grid Infrastructures

Large-scale grid infrastructures for in silico drug discovery open opportunities of particular interest to neglected and emerging diseases. In 2005 and 2006, we have been able to deploy large scale in silico docking within the framework of the WISDOM initiative against Malaria and Avian Flu requiring about 105 years of CPU on the EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid infrastructures. These achievements demonstrated the relevance of large-scale grid infrastructures for the virtual screening by molecular docking. This also allowed evaluating the performances of the grid infrastructures and to identify specific issues raised by large-scale deployment.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, The Third International Life Science Grid Workshop, LSGrid 2006, Yokohama, Japan, 13-14 october 2006, to appear in the proceeding

EU-IndiaGrid2 sustainable e-Infrastructures across Europe and India

EU-IndiaGrid2 - Sustainable e-infrastructures across Europe and India – is a project funded by European Commission under the Research Infrastructure Programme of the Information and Society Directorate General with the specific aim of promoting international interoperation between European and Indian e-Infrastructures. 2010 has been an eventful year for e-Infrastructures across Europe and India with a number of important achievements. EU-Indiagrid2, basing on the achievements of the previous EU-IndiaGrid project and on the active role of its partners was at the core of all these events that contributed significantly to the project progress towards its objectives. The present article reviews the most recent e-Infrastructures developments in India and their relationship with respect to Europe and the Asia-Pacific area

Energy efficiency considerations in integrated IT and optical network resilient infrastructures

The European Integrated Project GEYSERS - Generalised Architecture for Dynamic Infrastructure Services - is concentrating on infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources in support of the Future Internet with special emphasis on cloud computing. More specifically GEYSERS proposes the concept of Virtual Infrastructures over one or more interconnected Physical Infrastructures comprising both network and IT resources. Taking into consideration the energy consumption levels associated with the ICT today and the expansion of the Internet in size and complexity, that incurring increased energy consumption of both IT and network resources, energy efficient infrastructure design becomes critical. To address this need, in the framework of GEYSERS, we propose energy efficient design of infrastructures incorporating integrated optical network and IT resources, supporting resilient end-to-end services. Our modeling results quantify significant energy savings of the proposed solution by jointly optimizing the allocation of both network and IT resources

Material Flow Analysis: Outcome Focus (MFA:OF) for Elucidating the Role of Infrastructure in the Development of a Liveable City

Engineered infrastructures (i.e., utilities, transport & digital) underpin modern society. Delivering services via these is especially challenging in cities where differing infrastructures form a web of interdependencies. There must be a step change in how infrastructures deliver services to cities, if those cities are to be liveable in the future (i.e., provide for citizen wellbeing, produce less CO2 & ensure the security of the resources they use). Material Flow Analysis (MFA) is a useful methodology for understanding how infrastructures transfer resources to, within and from cities and contribute to the city’s metabolism. Liveable Cities, a five-year research programme was established to identify & test radical engineering interventions leading to liveable cities of the future. In this paper, the authors propose an outcome-focussed variation on the MFA methodology (MFA: OF), evidenced through work on the resource flows of Birmingham, UK. These flows include water, energy, food & carbon-intensive materials (e.g., steel, paper, glass), as well as their associated waste. The contribution MFA: OF makes to elucidating the interactions & interdependencies between the flows is highlighted and suggestions are made for how it can contribute to the (radical) rethinking of the engineered infrastructure associated with such flow

A territorial analysis of infrastructures in Italy

At a regional level the study of the infrastructures becomes really complicate when we consider: the territory equipment and the different potentiality of its development. Usually to this articulation corresponds even an analogue no homogeneity of the socio-economical conditions characterizing the various territorial areas. It is one of the most interesting aspect of the research to establish if and in which way these elements are connected among themselves, if it is possible that in an area the level of infrastructures can contribute to determine the development of the area or vice versa. To obtain this goal we must determine the quantity and quality of the infrastructures. In the reality the research of synthetic index and of the source of information - about the characteristics of the infrastructures - becomes an interesting instrument of the development polices. Even in the diversity of approaches, all the literature regarding the development and the competitiveness of modern productive systems agrees with the growing importance of the quantity and quality of the infrastructures. When we live the theoretical level to effectuate a check of the quantity and quality of the infrastructures in the reality the difficulties encountered aren't of easy solution nor few: findable ness of basic data, control of the minimum requisites of homogeneity and comparability, individuation of correct modality of statistic treatment, indicators building and so on. This research analyses the territorial diffusion of the infrastructures in the Italian regions. This is obtained through the application of qualitative and quantitative statistic indicators. Through the whole aggregation of data we try to determine a general indicator that measures the total level of the infrastructures.

Knowledge infrastructures for software service architectures

Software development has become a distributed, collaborative process based on the assembly of off-the-shelf and purpose-built components or services. The selection of software services from service repositories and their integration into software system architectures, but also the development of services for these repositories requires an accessible information infrastructure that allows the description and comparison of these services. General knowledge relating to software development is equally important in this context as knowledge concerning the application domain of the software. Both form two pillars on which the structural and behavioural properties of software services can be addressed. We investigate how this information space for software services can be organized. Focal point are ontologies that, in addition to the usual static view on knowledge, also intrinsically addresses the dynamics, i.e. the behaviour of software. We relate our discussion to the Web context, looking at the Web Services Framework and the Semantic Web as the knowledge representation framework

Climate change and transport infrastructures: State of the art

Transport infrastructures are lifelines: They provide transportation of people and goods, in ordinary and emergency conditions, thus they should be resilient to increasing natural disasters and hazards. This work presents several technologies adopted around the world to adapt and defend transport infrastructures against effects of climate change. Three main climate change challenges have been examined: Air temperatures variability and extremization, water bombs, and sea level rise. For each type of the examined phenomena the paper presents engineered, and architectural solutions adopted to prevent disasters and protect citizens. In all cases, the countermeasures require deeper prediction of weather and climate conditions during the service life of the infrastructure. The experience gained supports the fact that strategies adopted or designed to contrast the effects of climate change on transport infrastructures pursue three main goals: To prevent the damages, protect the structures, and monitor and communicate to users the current conditions. Indeed, the analyses show that the ongoing climate change will increase its impact on transport infrastructures, exposing people to unacceptable risks. Therefore, prevention and protection measures shall be adopted more frequently in the interest of collective safety