Assembling Cloud-Based Geographic Information Systems: A Pragmatic Approach Using Off-the-Shelf Components - Cloud Computing with e-Science Applications - page 159

Map Plug-in: A map plug-in is a specialized web-based map control that is
capable of displaying base maps and supports a display of multiple
layers of map objects, such as polygons, locations, or lines. Since the
idea of this project is to use Google or Microsoft Bing maps as base
maps because these are the most comprehensive maps available for
the whole world, this could be a Google or Bing maps control.
SRID: The Spatial Reference System Identifier (SRID) contains standardized
spatial coordinate system definitions for GIS.
Storage Account: Deploys a cloud-based storage repository that will be used
to store web applications.
Web Server/Hosted Service: This is a web server in the cloud with all neces-
sary APIs installed on it. Depending on the cloud services provider
and service provisioning model, this server may differ from a nor-
mal web server. Ideally, this web server must be horizontally and
vertically scalable in the cloud.
Web Services: Comprise software to enable the communication between
devices on the web with an XML (extensible markup language)
interface. A problem with rich Internet applications is coordinating
application logic between the middle tier and the presentation tier.
The best user experience requires the web services client to be aware
of the application logic that resides on the server. In our case, the
web service allows the client-side map plug-in to interact with the
database in an easy, controlled, and secured way.
Acknowledgments
This work has been partly funded by the Horizon Fund for Universities of
the Scottish Funding Council under the project Creating High-Value Cloud
Services: Services to the Cloud (April 2011-March 2014).
References
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Stoica, and Matei Zaharia. A view of cloud computing. Communications of the
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2. Muzafar Ahmad Bhat, Razeef Mohd Shah, and Bashir Ahmad. Cloud computing:
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