GeoSquare: collaborative geoprocessing models’ building, execution and sharing on Azure Cloud

Collaborative geoprocessing models have become one of the major solutions to significantly enhance the capacity to derive knowledge over a network, which are critical for the support of comprehensive analyses in a virtual geographic environment (VGE). With the emergence and growing maturity of the cloud computing infrastructure, a cloud-based platform for collaborative geoprocessing models promises to provide a pattern for the next generation of geoprocessing collaboration in the GIS realm. However, the problems with the existing collaborative geoprocessing models remain numerous, including the following: heterogeneity in description specifications hinders different geoprocessing services in collaborative work; the heterogeneity in messages mechanisms makes the cooperation among the geoprocessing services difficult and an integrated geoprocessing model framework centring on the collaborative model’s lifecycle is absent. To address these problems, this article proposes a cloud-based framework for building,...