Integration of Spatial Data Infrastructures with Grid Environment

The scope of this paper is to discuss and analyze different approaches and solutions in which the interoperability between the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and the Grid environment is feasible. Most of the SDIs are exposed using Geospatial Web services, standardized by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The Grid environment was built to overcome the distributed computing problems regarding the processing of large amounts of data and complex computations. For these reasons the interoperability between the two environments, Geospatial - represented by the OGC Web services - and Grid, would come as a great benefit in solving important issues in the Geospatial world. Discussions regarding this interoperability focus on emphasizing the benefits of this collaboration: ability to process large amounts of data, computationally intensive and complex calculations while achieving high performance. The interoperability of these two worlds has to be done while maintaining the functionalities of Geospatial Web services unaltered but also while taking advantage of the full Grid capabilities.