The NSF SI2-SSI: CyberGIS project focuses on establishing a fundamentally new Geographic Information System (GIS) software framework comprising seamlessly integrated cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities and, thus, enables widespread scientific
breakthroughs and broad societal impacts. The CyberGIS software framework is eliminating the limitations of monolithic and desktop-based
GIS software, and represents a paradigm shift for GIS and associated spatial analysis/modeling software to become scalable and sustainable
software ecosystems. The project includes the following set of activities and objectives:
- Engaging multidisciplinary communities through a participatory approach to evolving CyberGIS software requirements;
- Integrating and sustaining a core set of composable, interoperable, manageable, and reusable CyberGIS software elements based on community-driven and open source strategies;
- Empowering high-performance and scalable CyberGIS by exploiting spatial characteristics of data and analytical operations for achieving unprecedented capabilities for geospatial scientific discoveries;
- Enhancing an online geospatial problem solving environment to allow for the contribution, sharing and learning of CyberGIS software by numerous users, which will foster the development of crosscutting education, outreach and training programs with significant broad impacts;
- Deploying and testing CyberGIS software by linking with national and international cyberinfrastructure to achieve scalability to significant sizes of geospatial problems, amounts of CI resources, and number of users; and
- Evaluating and improving the CyberGIS framework through domain science applications and vibrant partnerships to gain better understanding of
the complexity of coupled human-natural systems (e.g. for assessing impacts of climate change and emergency management).
The CyberGIS software framework integrates multiple geospatial software elements which in aggregate have tens of thousands users of various domain sciences, and collectively meet the basic requirements for the scientific focus of our targeted communities that share geospatial foci. The framework builds on these existing tools while assuring the openness to integrate other software elements based on participatory community-driven requirement analysis.
Current software elements:
GISolve
GeoDa and PySAL
OpenTopography
Participatory Geographic Information Systems Technologies (PGIST)
pd-GRASS