Towards a Community "Playground:" Connecting CyberGIS with its Communities

Abstract

While high-performance computing is a fundamental component of CyberGIS, equally important is establishing a fundamental connection between CyberGIS and the various user communities requiring it. This involves the sharing, communication, and collaboration of authoritative, relevant spatial science not only among GIS specialists within their respective organizations, but across relat-ed scientific disciplines, between government agencies, and even to interested citi-zens seeking easy access to complex spatial analysis through a tailored, simplified user experience. In order to best to achieve such effective sharing and collabora-tion, one must also seek to understand the advantages and limitations of cloud computing in the context of spatial computation. We briefly introduce some key concepts of cloud GIS, followed by several use cases ranging from optimizing community resource allocation decisions, to coastal and marine spatial planning, to assessing solar energy potential in urban areas, to understanding river and wa-tershed dynamics. These examples underscore the great potential for CyberGIS to provide as a fundamental component an environment for users of varying back-ground and abilities an environment in which to perform and evaluate spatial analyses in a "community playground" of datasets, maps, scripts, web-based geo-processing services, and GIS analysis models. Indeed, exposing the power of spa-tial analysis to a larger audience (the non-GIS audience) may be the biggest long term value of CyberGIS, helping it toward the ultimate goals of facilitating com-munication and collaboration, breaking down barriers between institutions, disci-plines and cultures, and fostering a better connection between CyberGIS and its many communities.Keywords: Software as a Service (SaaS), cloud computing, community collaboration, GIS, geoprocessing service