The Issue of Cloud Computing for Digital Earth

by Dr Yong Xue

Abstract:
The vision of the Digital Earth has been continually interpreted and defined by the growing global community. As technological advances have made the unlikely possible, Digital Earth has come to encompass the large and growing worldwide set of web-based geographic computing systems. Tools to support the realization of the Digital Earth vision have been developed at different levels and at different scales, ranging from geo-browsers for online collaborative mapping tools to spatial data infrastructures. Cloud computing represents both the applications that delivered as services over the internet and the hardware and the systems software in the data centres that provide the services. The services have long been referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS). Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) have also been widely used to describe the services by some companies. The cloud itself contains both data center hardware and software. To some degree, cloud computing has incomparable technical advantages comparing with web services and grid computing.It seems that cloud computing is the way to solve the bottleneck in remote sensing quantitative inversion. But after analyzing the business style of cloud computing, we find that it might not be a proper method. It is possible to share various algorithms in the cloud computing environment, but it is too expensive to share vast amounts of remote sensing data on it.

Short Biography:
Dr. Xue is a Reader in Computation, a Senior Member of IEEE and a Charted Physicist. His research interests include Digital Earth, Remote Sensing and GIS, High Performance Computation. He has published more than 70 peer-reviewed journal papers and 82 peer-reviewed conference papers. One of his papers has been cited more than 37 times. Twelve PhD students have successfully finished their study and have been granted PhD degrees under his supervision. Dr Xue is a chapter chair of IEEE UKRI chapter, an associated editor of International Journal of Remote Sensing and an associated editor of International Journal of Digital Earth, both published by Taylor & Francis, UK. (Email: y.xue@londonmet.ac.uk)