From GISystems to GIServices: Spatial Computing on the Internet Marketplace

Many of the functions performed by GIS seem to be amenable to a business model that is fundamentally different from the one we see today. At present, GIS users typically own the hardware and software they use. They pay license and maintenance fees to various vendors. The alternative would be a service-oriented approach where users make their input data available to some GIS service center that performs the necessary computations remotely and sends the results back to the user. Customers pay only for that particular usage of the GIS technology -- without having to own a GIS. We discuss this business model and associated problems of privacy and ease-ofuse. We also give an overview of our MMM system (http://mmm.wiwi.hu-berlin.de), a distributed computing infrastructure that supports this business model