Intelligent geospatial data retrieval based on the geospatial grid portal

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard-compliant services define a set of standard interfaces for geospatial Web services to achieve the interoperability in an open distributed computing environment. Grid technology is a distributed computing infrastructure to allow distributed resources sharing and coordinated problem solving. Based on the OGC standards for geospatial services and grid technology, we propose the geospatial grid portal to integrate and interoperate grid-enabled geospatial services. The implementation of the geospatial grid portal is based on a three-tier architecture which consists of grid-enabled geospatial services tier, grid service portal tier and application tier. The OGC standard-compliant services are deployed in a grid environment, the so-called grid-enabled geospatial services. Grid service portals for each type of geospatial services, including WFS, WMS, WCS and CSW, provide a single point of Web entry to discover and access different types of geospatial information. A resource optimization mechanism is incorporated into these service portals to optimize the selection of grid nodes. At the top tier, i.e. the application tier, the client interacts with a semantic middleware for the grid CSW portal, thus allows the semantics-enabled search. The proposed approach can not only optimize the grid resource selection among multiple grid nodes, but also incorporate the power of Semantic Web technology into geospatial grid portal to allow the precise discovery of geospatial data.