Hans Viehmann
Product Manager EMEA
ORACLE Corporation
Germany

Abstract
Cloud-based Spatial Data Infrastructure for Smart Cities

Geospatial data are essential for countless purposes in a Smart City, from city planning to location-based citizen services. Local Governments have therefore started to build distributed repositories of spatial data which are increasingly accessible via open standards interfaces using the typical components of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI). In such a scenario, various kinds of spatial data are consumed by a broad range of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or visualization tools, both on desktop systems or mobile devices, through a service-oriented architecture. With new services rapidly proliferating and the growth rate of spatial data warehouses being fuelled by the trend towards 3-dimensional or even 4-dimensional data being collected at rapidly increasing rates, the existing platforms are becoming more and more expensive to operate. The high degree of standardization of the constituents of SDIs and the loose coupling between them makes them excellent candidates for a cloud computing approach. The cloud computing paradigm allows a more cost efficient management of these components by using a centralized hosted IT platform and thus primarily making use of the economy of scale. At the same time it reduces cost and time-to-market by providing a higher degree of automation and by including self-service functionalities. And the fundamental concept of elasticity of cloud-based platforms helps to address the challenge of varying and unpredictable loads on the services within an SDI. This presentation describes how cloud computing can be introduced based on a maturity model. The various stages - consolidation, extension to private cloud, introduction of public cloud where appropriate - are described briefly and will be discussed in the context of geospatial data. Typical challenges in the introduction such as the impact on IT operations, security, data integration and semantic interoperability are included and customer use cases are used to illustrate the approach.