Managing user-generated information in geospatial cyberinfrastructures

Information systems built using standards-based distributed services have become the default computing paradigm adopted by the geospatial community for building information infrastructures also known as Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Government mandates such as the INSPIRE European Directive recommend standards for sharing resources (e.g., data and processes) with the goal of improving environmental (and related) decision making. Although SDIs present benefits to data providers in terms of data sharing and management, most geospatial infrastructures have been built following a top-down approach in which official providers (most commonly mapping agencies) are permitted to deploy and maintain resources. Because the mechanisms to deploy resources in these infrastructures are technologically complex, there has been limited participation from users, resulting in a scarcity of deployed resources. To address these limitations, we present a distributed architecture based on INSPIRE principles and extended with a Service Framework component. This component improves ad hoc integration and deployment of geospatial data resources within geospatial information infrastructures. The Service Framework addresses the need to improve the availability of geospatial data resources by providing mechanisms to assist users in wrapping resources to generate INSPIRE-based services. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.