A Geospatial Information Grid Framework for Geological Survey

PLoS One. 2015 Dec 28;10(12):e0145312. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0145312. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

The use of digital information in geological fields is becoming very important. Thus, informatization in geological surveys should not stagnate as a result of the level of data accumulation. The integration and sharing of distributed, multi-source, heterogeneous geological information is an open problem in geological domains. Applications and services use geological spatial data with many features, including being cross-region and cross-domain and requiring real-time updating. As a result of these features, desktop and web-based geographic information systems (GISs) experience difficulties in meeting the demand for geological spatial information. To facilitate the real-time sharing of data and services in distributed environments, a GIS platform that is open, integrative, reconfigurable, reusable and elastic would represent an indispensable tool. The purpose of this paper is to develop a geological cloud-computing platform for integrating and sharing geological information based on a cloud architecture. Thus, the geological cloud-computing platform defines geological ontology semantics; designs a standard geological information framework and a standard resource integration model; builds a peer-to-peer node management mechanism; achieves the description, organization, discovery, computing and integration of the distributed resources; and provides the distributed spatial meta service, the spatial information catalog service, the multi-mode geological data service and the spatial data interoperation service. The geological survey information cloud-computing platform has been implemented, and based on the platform, some geological data services and geological processing services were developed. Furthermore, an iron mine resource forecast and an evaluation service is introduced in this paper.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Electronic Data Processing
  • Geographic Information Systems*
  • Geographic Mapping*
  • Geography / methods
  • Geology / methods*
  • Information Dissemination / methods*
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • Internet
  • Models, Theoretical

Grants and funding

National Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41401443), Key Research Project supported by Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant Nos. 2015CFA012).