Improving Spatial Decision Making in Cloud Computing

Abstract

The increasing capabilities of Internet have caused a qualitative change in the management of spatial information while recent advances in Web 2.0 technologies have enabled the integration of data and knowledge in intuitive thematic maps. This has wide-ranging indirect effects in supporting the ways stakeholders make a decision based on information coming from various distributed resources, but the real question is, What applications and technologies are in place to deal with these decisional environments? Aiming at giving an answer to this question, this chapter explores the feasibility of a computational environment that supports the Web-based exploration and the spatial analysis in real estate decisional processes. It relies on the concept of dataspace as a new scenario for accessing, integrating, and analyzing geo-spatial information regardless of its format and location. Built on top of a cloud environment, it is made up of specialized modules, each of which provides a well-defined service. Mash-ups integrate data from different resources on the Internet and provide the user with a flexible and easy-to-use way for geo-referencing data in the maps provided by Google Maps and Google Earth. Through an interactive process, the user arrives at some interesting maps, glimpses the most important facets of the decisional problem, and combines them to fashion a solution. Applicative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the computational environment proposed.