This collaborative project is focused on GIS vector-based spatial data overlay processing through cloud computing. Vector-based processing is considerably more complicated than raster data processing because raster data is based on regular grid-based fixed-size pixels, while vector features have irregular geometric shapes represented by a list of large number of vertices. GIS data files can be very large-scale huge and as such, computational requirements are significant. Cloud platforms such as Azure are appropriate for large-scale computing and storage capabilities. These capabilities combined with accessibility on-demand and other features have made cloud processing very desirable for GIS applications. This exploratory research will attempt to discover distributed algorithms and test their scalable implementations for GIS overlay processing on the Azure platform.
