Design and application on the cloud computing based method of marine environment data sharing

The integration and sharing of marine environment data is one of the important research goals in marine GIS. Several problems have blocked the effective sharing of marine environmental data in the past, such as load unbalance in data services, limited data sharing modes and unobvious data servers. With the advent of cloud computing technologies, great changes occurred in the modes for data sharing. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and economies of scale; similar to a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network. The theoretical foundation of cloud computing therefore is the broader concept of converged infrastructure and shared services. This paper presents a data sharing architecture for the marine environment based on cloud computing. The architecture providers of aIaaS(Infrastructure as a Service) offer computers-either physical or more often virtual machines and other resources. The DaaS(Data as a Service) mode in the architecture is based on the concept that a product, data in this case, can be provided on demand to the user regardless of the geographic or organizational separation of provider and consumer. The PaaS(Platform as a Service) mode in the architecture providers deliver a computing platform, typically including operating system, programming language execution environment, database, and web server. Application developers can develop and run their software solutions on a cloud platform without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. Through this architecture, the user acts as both user and provider. The architecture provides some core functions for user, such as data release, data needs release, data discovery, needs discovery and feedback functions. This marine environment data sharing mode can inspire marine researchers to contribute their data thus ensuring effective and sustainable data resource integration. A prototype system for marine environment information cloud computing platform was realized, and simultaneously the feasibility and practicality of our technical solution was tested. © 2016, Research and Development Office of Wuhan University. All right reserved.