Big Data Computing For Geospatial Applications

The convergence of big data and geospatial computing has brought forth challenges and opportunities to Geographic Information Science with regard to geospatial data management, processing, analysis, modeling, and visualization. This book highlights recent advancements in integrating new computing approaches, spatial methods, and data management strategies to tackle geospatial big data challenges and meanwhile demonstrates opportunities for using big data for geospatial applications. Crucial to the advancements highlighted in this book is the integration of computational thinking and spatial thinking and the transformation of abstract ideas and models to concrete data structures and algorithms.

The convergence of big data and geospatial computing has brought forth challenges and opportunities to Geographic Information Science with regard to geospatial data management, processing, analysis, modeling, and visualization. This book highlights recent advancements in integrating new computing approaches, spatial methods, and data management strategies to tackle geospatial big data challenges and meanwhile demonstrates opportunities for using big data for geospatial applications. Crucial to the advancements highlighted in this book is the integration of computational thinking and spatial thinking and the transformation of abstract ideas and models to concrete data structures and algorithms.

This book introduces the latest research findings in cloud, edge, fog, and mist computing and their applications in various fields using geospatial data. It solves a number of problems of cloud computing and big data, such as scheduling, security issues using different techniques, which researchers from industry and academia have been attempting to solve in virtual environments. Some of these problems are of an intractable nature and so efficient technologies like fog, edge and mist computing play an important role in addressing these issues. By exploring emerging advances in cloud computing and big data analytics and their engineering applications, the book enables researchers to understand the mechanisms needed to implement cloud, edge, fog, and mist computing in their own endeavours, and motivates them to examine their own research findings and developments.

This volume fills a research gap between the rapid development of High Performance Computing (HPC) approaches and their geospatial applications. With a focus on geospatial applications, the book discusses in detail how researchers apply HPC to tackle their geospatial problems. Based on this focus, the book identifies the opportunities and challenges revolving around geospatial applications of HPC. Readers are introduced to the fundamentals of HPC, and will learn how HPC methods are applied in various specific areas of geospatial study. The book begins by discussing theoretical aspects and methodological uses of HPC within a geospatial context, including parallel algorithms, geospatial data handling, spatial analysis and modeling, and cartography and geovisualization. Then, specific domain applications of HPC are addressed in the contexts of earth science, land use and land cover change, urban studies, transportation studies, and social science. The book will be of interest to scientists and engineers who are interested in applying cutting-edge HPC technologies in their respective fields, as well as students and faculty engaged in geography, environmental science, social science, and computer science.

Big data has always been a major challenge in geoinformatics as geospatial data come in various types and formats, new geospatial data are acquired very fast, and geospatial databases are inherently very large. And while there have been advances in hardware and software for handling big data, they often fall short of handling geospatial big data ef

This handbook covers a wide range of topics related to the collection, processing, analysis, and use of geospatial data in their various forms. This handbook provides an overview of how spatial computing technologies for big data can be organized and implemented to solve real-world problems. Diverse subdomains ranging from indoor mapping and navigation over trajectory computing to earth observation from space, are also present in this handbook. It combines fundamental contributions focusing on spatio-textual analysis, uncertain databases, and spatial statistics with application examples such as road network detection or colocation detection using GPUs. In summary, this handbook gives an essential introduction and overview of the rich field of spatial information science and big geospatial data. It introduces three different perspectives, which together define the field of big geospatial data: a societal, governmental, and governance perspective. It discusses questions of how the acquisition, distribution and exploitation of big geospatial data must be organized both on the scale of companies and countries. A second perspective is a theory-oriented set of contributions on arbitrary spatial data with contributions introducing into the exciting field of spatial statistics or into uncertain databases. A third perspective is taking a very practical perspective to big geospatial data, ranging from chapters that describe how big geospatial data infrastructures can be implemented and how specific applications can be implemented on top of big geospatial data. This would include for example, research in historic map data, road network extraction, damage estimation from remote sensing imagery, or the analysis of spatio-textual collections and social media. This multi-disciplinary approach makes the book unique. This handbook can be used as a reference for undergraduate students, graduate students and researchers focused on big geospatial data. Professionals can use this book, as well as practitioners facing big collections of geospatial data.

This proceedings volume introduces recent work on the storage, retrieval and visualization of spatial Big Data, data-intensive geospatial computing and related data quality issues. Further, it addresses traditional topics such as multi-scale spatial data representations, knowledge discovery, space-time modeling, and geological applications. Spatial analysis and data mining are increasingly facing the challenges of Big Data as more and more types of crowd sourcing spatial data are used in GIScience, such as movement trajectories, cellular phone calls, and social networks. In order to effectively manage these massive data collections, new methods and algorithms are called for. The book highlights state-of-the-art advances in the handling and application of spatial data, especially spatial Big Data, offering a cutting-edge reference guide for graduate students, researchers and practitioners in the field of GIScience.

Data science has recently gained much attention for a number of reasons, and among them is Big Data. Scientists (from almost all disciplines including physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, among others) and engineers (from all fields including civil, environmental, chemical, mechanical, among others) are faced with challenges posed by data volume, variety, and velocity, or Big Data. This book is designed to highlight the unique characteristics of geospatial data, demonstrate the need to different approaches and techniques for obtaining new knowledge from raw geospatial data, and present select state-of-the-art geospatial data science techniques and how they are applied to various geoscience problems.