Peer-to-peer Based Gis Web Services

Geographic Information System (GIS) based on Internet is a promising research field, which brings new approaches to access, share and disseminate geographic information. However, current Internet-based GIS relies heavily on centralized server, which inevitably has drawbacks such as single points of failure and network congestion etc. In recent years, Peer-to-Peer (simply P2P) and Web services are two of hot research topics in network computing and appear as two extremes of distributed computing paradigm. By adopting a decentralized network-based style, P2P technology can improve scalability/reliability, enhance the overall reliability and fault-tolerance, increase autonomy and enable ad-hoc communication and collaboration. On the contrary, current proposals for Web services infrastructures are mainly based on centralized approaches, which are prone to introducing single points of failure, hotspots in the network, and exposing vulnerability to malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the techniques of building GIS Web services systems in P2P environment. By combining Web services and P2P technologies into GIS, we aim to add more flexibility and autonomy to GIS Web services systems, and alleviate to some degree the inherent limitations of centralized systems. We propose a P2P based GIS Web Service architecture, and as a case study, we present our ongoing project BP-GServices, i.e., BestPeer based GIS Web Services, and the major techniques of BP-GServices implementation.