Towards a Community “Playground:” Connecting CyberGIS with Its Communities

While high-performance computing is a fundamental component of CyberGIS, equally important is establishing a fundamental connection between CyberGIS and the various user communities requiring it. This involves the sharing, communication, and collaboration of authoritative, relevant spatial science not only among GIS specialists within their respective organizations, but across related scientific disciplines, between government agencies, and even to interested citizens seeking easy access to complex spatial analysis through a tailored, simplified user experience. In order to best to achieve such effective sharing and collaboration, one must also seek to understand the advantages and limitations of cloud computing in the context of spatial computation. We briefly introduce some key concepts of cloud GIS, followed by several use cases ranging from optimizing community resource allocation decisions, to coastal and marine spatial planning, to assessing solar energy potential in urban areas, to understanding river and watershed dynamics. These examples underscore the great potential for CyberGIS to provide as a fundamental component an environment for users of varying background and abilities an environment in which to perform and evaluate spatial analyses in a “community playground” of datasets, maps, scripts, web-based geoprocessing services, and GIS analysis models. Indeed, exposing the power of spatial analysis to a larger audience (the non-GIS audience) may be the biggest long-term value of CyberGIS, helping it toward the ultimate goals of facilitating communication and collaboration, breaking down barriers between institutions, disciplines and cultures, and fostering a better connection between CyberGIS and its many communities.