A collaborative virtual geographic environment based on P2P and Grid technologies

Solving a geographic problem usually requires collaborative work among a group of people in different geographic locations. Collaborative virtual geographic environment (CVGE), an integrated technology, offers an intuitive, efficient, and interactive visualization environment through which geographically separated users can explore complicated spatial information and conduct collaborative work. In this paper, two new technologies, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid computing, are tightly coupled to develop a CVGE system. This paper evaluates the potential contributions of the P2P and Grid technology to CVGE systems. Using a Grid based system architecture efficiently integrates and shares geographically distributed resources as well as modeling procedures built on different platforms. To offer a shared and interactive virtual collaborative geographic environment for resolving geographic problems, we developed several P2P services including a terrain visualization collaboration service and a video collaboration service. Finally, a CVGE prototype system is implemented for collaboration on silt dam planning on the Loess plateau. The experimental results show that the scheme developed in this paper is efficient and feasible.