GEOCLOUDS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

Abstract

Environmental monitoring and management are multidisciplinary tasks which require a continuous and close cooperation among involved stakeholders from various public entities, based in different locations. This fact poses a serious problem on critical aspects of environment-related projects including: data acquisition, processing and management, sharing and interoperability. This problem can be tackled using cloud computing technology and services which can provide to stakeholders capabilities regarding the above issues in real time, thus providing the means for an effective environmental management and decision-making. The present paper aims to document the above relationship by identifying the special features and needs associated with environmental projects which in turn may be satisfied and optimised through geospatial cloud computing components termed in the present as GeoClouds. GeoClouds are proven geospatial tools and services and include services, metadata description editors, and spatial data interoperability formats which may be placed in a typical system architecture and may ideally be implemented in the Cloud.