Implementing Geographic Information System Grid Services Using Distributed Messaging Systems

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide a number of standard services for managing data sources (such as faults, GPS, and earthquake event catalogs) and generating map displays. These may be integrated with remote services for running simulation codes to create a distributed computational environment for integrating data, simulation, and analysis/visualization tools. Such systems are usually refered to as "Grids". We present in this talk our work building a GIS grid around modern distributed computing concepts: Web Services and Service Oriented architectures. These distributed systems glue together database and analysis tools with more traditional approaches to high performance computing. The main developments outlined in this talk are a) implementing GIS services as Web Services; b) integrating these services into a message based grid using the NaradaBrokering infrastructure; and c) extending GIS services to support earthquake simulation and visualization as part of the NASA SERVOGrid project.