A Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure for Research and Education Using Geospatial Model

Many geospatial modelers around the world use remote sensing data to simulate environmental processes, ecological system and testing agricultural management scenarios. Once these tasks are complete including publication of results, the models generally are not published or made available to the public for further use and improvement. Sharing of models may open doors for new collaborations, and avoids duplication of efforts. For researchers, who are interested in sharing models, there are limited avenues to publishing their models to the wider community. Towards filling this gap, a prototype cyberinfrastructure is developed for publishing, sharing and running geospatial models in an interactive GIS-enabled web environment. Users can utilize the Hub to publish or upload their own models, search and download existing models or data developed by others, run simulations including processing, analysis and calibration using computing and storage resources provided by Cloud. This should open the way for easy development of a variety of web-enabled tools for probing and presenting digital geospatial data in ways that can help addressing issues around the globe.